Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

Three corrections

Please comment if there are any questions. Apteva (talk) 19:11, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

It appears that the example "the Uganda–Tanzania War; the Roman–Syrian War; the east–west runway; the Lincoln–Douglas debates; a carbon–carbon bond" while not commenting that it is a little long (do we really need so many examples?), is in need of two corrections; in the first example, "the Uganda–Tanzania War", war should not be capitalized (see google book search), and it should be "but not the Roman–Syrian War (as Roman-Syrian War is a proper name)". The article at Uganda–Tanzania War should also be moved, to Uganda–Tanzania war, and if it is a proper name, a better example used, and it be moved to Uganda-Tanzania War. (already moved) [and now it needs to be moved, but there is an RM to decide that...] Apteva (talk) 23:08, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Comment. I have reverted Apteva's undiscussed move of Uganda–Tanzania War, which was apparently done to prove a point here and not in the interest of the article itself.
  This section attracted no comment before Apteva elevated it to an RFC, probably because Apteva is pushing on proper names, en dashes, and hyphens at several forums at the same time – including an RM, now closed as not moved, for the long-settled Mexican–American War. I have explicitly said, on this talkpage and elsewhere, that general issues with WP:MOS guidelines should be raised as general issues, right here. Not at several locations, and not as particular sparring points. It seems to me that this RFC is yet another waste of time. I comment on one detail only: yes, obviously many examples are needed in the guideline. Even more than we have now, perhaps. Some editors are still refusing to accept the principle it is based on as consensual; and Apteva, for example, is playing hard by appeal to inconsequential differences among the present examples. If any element of the long and meticulous community consultation on dashes in 2011 needs review, let it be done in an orderly and informed way. Some recommended background reading for those interested: the article Proper noun, most of which is now accurate. (It needs a move to Proper name.)
  Noetica^Tea? 21:48, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

  It was a correct move. Uganda–Tanzania war is not a proper noun and is not capitalized. Nor was it undiscussed. The date and time in the above discussion shows that it was pointed out on September 27 that it should be moved, and that it was not moved until October 5 (and a check of the edit history will show that I noted that it had been moved when I opened the RfC on October 7). Clearly plenty of time and some for anyone to disagree with the proposal. Seeing none, I took it as approval, not an unusual response. Should an RM to move proper noun come to my attention I would object. And I think that would be the consensus. The word phrase "proper noun" did not enter use until about 1890. The dictionary, if it contains "proper name", defines it as proper noun. The two terms are interchangeable. I have called for an RfC because I am not going to get into an edit war over the Revert. In the BRD cycle, after R comes D. There had been no response, so I am asking for a response. I do not believe that a review of a clearly embarrassing discussion needs to be reviewed. Proper names use hyphens and our MOS says so. 10,000 books use a hyphen and maybe a 100 use something else. Case closed. I would like to remind everyone to focus on the issue, not the editor, though. WP is never an authority on anything, proper nouns included. WP articles can never be used as a RS. Apteva (talk) 02:40, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

These topics have already been the focus of much long and pointless argumentation that wasted the time of multiple editors, time that could have been spent elsewhere, like in creating content. I don't understand the point of reopening these discussions so soon after they have finally and painfully been settled by consensus. --Neotarf (talk) 08:03, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations to Noetica, the proper noun article has just been cited by no less an authority than Mark Liberman at Language Log. [1] --Neotarf (talk) 08:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey, that's good for WP's reputation. Tony (talk) 13:26, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

There are still improvements that are needed - fix the misleading and incorrect examples. If someone wants to argue that proper nouns are not capitalized or that sentences do not need periods, not questions of course, then certainly their time is better spent elsewhere, but if someone insists that Roman-Syrian War is spelled with an endash they will have a very hard time supporting that premise. Is War capitalized in "Uganda-Tanzania War"? Possibly, but if it is the punctuation is a hyphen and not an appropriate example of where to use an endash. If war is not capitalized, Uganda–Tanzania war is an example of where an endash is used, and the capitalization needs to be fixed. In both cases the current article needs to be moved - either to Uganda-Tanzania War or to Uganda–Tanzania war. There are always people who misspell things, and use incorrect punctuation, and that is why there is an edit tab and a move option. Apteva (talk) 03:49, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Uganda–Tanzania war

Uganda–Tanzania war has not "achieved proper name status" and should be spelled with a lower case w in war. If it has "achieved proper name status", then it should be spelled with a hyphen. When something has not achieved "proper name status", it is simply a construct of words, using punctuation to convey meaning. Since it is a war between Uganda and Tanzania, an endash is used, instead of a hyphen. While few editors would notice the nuance, it is reasonable to be correct. Whether dashes should be allowed in titles is a discussion which belongs at WP:TITLE, not at WP:MOS. Apteva (talk) 07:24, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Roman-Syrian War

As this has achieved "proper name status" it is be spelled with a hyphen, using common usage. Likewise, Mexican-American War is also spelled with a hyphen, in the vast majority of sources. Apteva (talk) 07:24, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Comet Hale-Bopp

This example: "Comet Hale–Bopp or just Hale–Bopp (discovered by Hale and Bopp)" needs to be removed because used either with or without the word "Comet" this is still a proper noun and therefore uses a hyphen, as supported by the thousands of reliable sources that use this punctuation. According to Google Books there are 31,900 sources, the overwhelming majority of which use a hyphen. It is not even close. Apteva (talk) 22:47, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Nonsense. Many of those reliable sources do use the en dash, which confirms that it is simply a styling choice. The fact that many sources have a style that substitutes hyphens in the traditional role of the en dash, and that the Google books OCR can't tell the difference, does not mean that WP needs to adopt that style. There's nothing special or unique about Hale–Bopp here. Your concept of "proper noun, therefore hyphen" is unsupportable hallucination. Dicklyon (talk) 01:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Not nonsense at all. There are some sources that do use en dash, but if there were many, as in many more than use hyphen, then statistically at least one would have appeared in the first ten. Out of the first 100 how many use hyphen? Out of the first 1,000 how many? Google books has 32,900 to look through. I strongly disagree with the supposition that an OCR can not tell the difference as there are a huge number of occurrences in google books of both endashes where they are appropriate and em dashes where they are appropriate. While it is far easier to do a text search, I am completely confident in my assessment that there are no endashes in the first 10 results that I obtained. As was pointed out before, any suggestion of "many" needs to also include "out of how many", as saying there are 432 examples of using Hale-Bopp with an endash sounds impressive until you find out, say, that that was out of 32,000, with 29,000 using a hyphen and 3,000 using a space, just as a made up example. Proper noun hyphen is not fiction. It is in our MOS and I really have yet to see any example of a proper noun that does not use a hyphen. I am not saying they do not exist. I can certainly imagine that if someone named Hale-Bopp and someone named Lennard-Jones discovered a comet it could be called the "Hale-Bopp–Lennard-Jones Comet, to distinguish between one discovered by Hale and someone named Bopp-Lennard-Jones, or by one person named Hale-Bopp-Lennard and one named Jones. Normally exceptions to rules are pretty easy to find. It is academic to find them, but still interesting, and I really have not seen one. One editor perhaps looked for examples of endashes in WP article titles and came up with two that are not proper nouns and two that are using incorrect punctuation on WP. Since when has WP ever been considered a reliable source? Apteva (talk) 04:27, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Nonsense. Several of them DO in fact appear in the first page of 10 hits on Google Book Search (with previews). You need to actually look at the previews to see how they are styled, as the OCR does not distinguish hyphen from en dash usually (and sometimes it sees en dashes as em dashes—I was going to say like this one, but it turns out that one really did get typeset with an em dash, due to some amateur typographer's blunder). If en dashes do show up sometimes in snippets, in probably from books that they got electronically, as with this one, where you can tell they got it electronically because if you zoom way in the letters aren't blurry or pixelated; they're being rendered from text. The same effect is often seen in Google Scholar, where papers with en dashes often show up as hyphen, but not always; in spite of that, nearly half show up on the first scholar results page with en dash. It's not an usual style like you're making it out to be. Dicklyon (talk) 05:33, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Am I hearing an echo? 5/20 is a long way from "nearly half". It is 3 to 1 in favor of using a hyphen. Which is correct based on that information? Clearly a hyphen. Apteva (talk) 06:35, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

For now I have changed "Comet" to comet, per p. 48 of the New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors, and per our article on the comet, which does not capitalize the word comet - hence an endash is correct as it is not treated as a proper noun. There is an open RM to move the page to Comet Hale-Bopp, treating it as a proper noun. Sources clearly favor proper noun status. Halley's comet, on the other hand, does not favor proper noun status and can also be corrected. Apteva (talk) 16:28, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Please see WP:Policies and guidelines#Not part of the encyclopedia: "The policies, guidelines, and process pages themselves are not part of the encyclopedia proper. Consequently, they do not generally need to conform with the content standards. It is therefore not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's administrative pages, or to phrase Wikipedia procedures or principles in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's editorial practices. Instead, the content of these pages is controlled by community-wide consensus, and the style should emphasize clarity, directness, and usefulness to other editors."

The "New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors" does not have any authority over Wikipedia. The Wikipedia house style for comets is here: WP:Naming conventions (astronomical objects)#Comets.

--Neotarf (talk) 18:22, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Irrelevant. The name we have chosen is "comet" not "Comet". Using "Comet" gives it proper noun status, and it becomes Comet Hale-Bopp, with a hyphen, not an endash. the section referenced says to use the common name, and if none, give it proper noun status (how generous). The example, Comet Hyakutake, is littered with references that use comet and ones that use Comet. Apteva (talk) 18:53, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

IMHO, recalling high school grammar classes might be of help here. Is the word "comet" a part of the name, or it just reiterates what the name is about? In other words, can we leave "comet" out without loss of meaning? Does the (c/C)omet Halley-Bopp resemble the "New York Times" newspaper and a McDonald's restaurant, or, rather, The Wall Street Journal and the White House?

To my feeling, that particular space object is called Halley's Comet, and another one is called Hale-Bopp Comet. Since the names of space objects (planets, stars, comets, galaxies, constellations, etc.) are always capitalised (e.g., Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Aldebaran, Vega, Milky Way, Sun, etc., etc.) , the word "comet" should also be capitalised in all the instances, since it is an inseparable part of that object's name. Rules as to dash/hyphen should apply accordingly. kashmiri 19:52, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Of course Comet Hale-Bopp (however hyphenated) is a proper noun. All names are proper nouns. Some sources may choose not to capitalize it; that's a style decision (a poor one in my view, but style rather than grammar). But even in those sources, it's still a proper noun — that's a grammatical rather than stylistic category. --Trovatore (talk) 20:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

That may be obvious to any number of people, but it is not obvious to the people who write articles about the comet, or Articles as in scientific articles published elsewhere.[2] In both cases the spelling of the dictionary is used. Why would we write a style guide that no one was using? Style guides should follow what we are doing, not make up rules that no one uses. I suggest that Comet should be changed to comet in Celestial bodies to agree with common use. We use sun and moon when 99.9+% (probably a lot more 9s for sun than moon) of the time we actually mean Sun and Moon, and it is ridiculous to capitalize it, and not done in common practice. Our style guides need to follow common practice, not introduce peculiarities. Apteva (talk) 21:04, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Your reference to "common use" seems misguided: Sun and Moon are always capitalised when used as names of celestial bodies (i.e., not in sun lotion, sunbathing, moonlight, etc.); so are Earth, Mercury, etc. As to your removal of capitalisation in "Comet", I would thus suggest you refrain from making edits that deliberately violate WP:MoS. Any such changes should be reverted. kashmiri 21:44, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Speaking only for myself, I am not making any edits that violate the MOS. The MOS says that proper names use hyphens, so I am moving articles that are proper nouns and use an endash, like, for example, Mexican-American War and Spanish-American War. Doing that brings them into compliance with the MOS. I am removing the examples in the MOS that are not in compliance with the MOS. The MOS says that proper nouns use hyphens, and has three examples that are proper nouns yet use an endash. One of them, comet Hale–Bopp, is not capitalized in our article, is not capitalized in a respected dictionary, and yet is capitalized as an example in our MOS. What's up with that? What I do need to do, though, is politely ask editors to read the section of the MOS on hyphens and note that there actually are places they are used - like in proper nouns. We all need to get on the same page here though, and if someone can show me 10,000 books that use an endash in Mexican-American War, and that there are less than use a hyphen, by all means that is what we also should use. But no matter how some editors came to the conclusion that Mexican-American War should have been spelled with an endash so they are going to use one, if in fact that is not a reasonable decision, it needs to be re-opened. In case no one has noticed, out of 4 million articles, there are some that have errors, and that is where I would prefer to spend my time. Fixing errors - like the spelling of Mexican-American War. Apteva (talk) 02:27, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

A Google Books search shows about 50% capitalize "Comet". Art LaPella (talk) 23:57, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

True. But how many dictionaries capitalize Halley's comet or comet Hale–Bopp? Apteva (talk) 02:27, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Most online dictionaries on the OneLook list capitalize the "C". Some capitalize it inconsistently. None on my list uncapitalize it consistently, although Dictionary.com's Halley's comet definition comes closest. Art LaPella (talk) 04:51, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

But now I found two uncapitalizers elsewhere. Art LaPella (talk) 05:07, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

The dictionary link for Comet Hale-Bopp is amusing - links to WP with a hyphen, even though the article uses an endash, as of 2011 - "05:05, 26 January 2011‎ CWenger (talk | contribs)‎ . . (31 bytes) (+31)‎ . . (moved Comet Hale-Bopp to Comet Hale–Bopp: MOS:ENDASH #1, comet discovered by Hale and Bopp)".

We found 3 dictionaries with English definitions that include the word comet Hale-Bopp: Click on the first link on a line below to go directly to a page where "comet Hale-Bopp" is defined.

General dictionaries General (1 matching dictionary)

Comet Hale-Bopp: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]

Computing dictionaries Computing (1 matching dictionary)

Comet Hale-Bopp, Hale-Bopp, Comet: Encyclopedia [home, info]

Slang dictionaries Slang (1 matching dictionary)

Comet Hale-Bopp: Urban Dictionary [home, info]

I checked to see if it was just copying the punctuation used in the search entry, and replaced the hyphen with an endash and got:

Sorry, no dictionaries indexed in the selected category contain the exact phrase comet Hale–Bopp. Apteva (talk) 15:59, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

• You might want to check s.t. other than a dict, such as Cometary Science after Hale–Bopp (Böhnhardt, Combi, Kidger, & Schulz, eds, Springer 2003), which uses the en dash in numerous papers and research notes, such as The 1995–2002 Long-Term Monitoring of Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale–Bopp) at Radio Wavelength; Large-Scale Structures in Comet Hale–Bopp; Modelling of Shape Changes of the Nuclei of Comets C/1995 O1 Hale–Bopp and 46P/Wirtanen Caused by Water Ice Sublimation; Observations of Rotating Jets of Carbon Monoxide in Comet Hale–Bopp with the IRAM Interferometer; From Hale–Bopp's Activity to Properties of its Nucleus; The Shadow of Comet Hale–Bopp in Lyman–Alpha, 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3 – One Orbit after Break-Up; Nitrogen Sulfide in Comets Hyakutake (C/1996 B2) and Hale–Bopp (C/1995 O1), etc. These are proceedings of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Colloquium No. 186 "Cometary Science after Hale–Bopp" (Tenerife, Jan. 2002), which followed the First International Conference on Comet Hale–Bopp in Jan. 1998. There are other, similar uses, such as 4015/Wilson–Harrington, 55P/Tempel–Tuttle, the Kuiper–Edgeworth (K–E) belt, the Hertz–Knudsen relationship, and the Stefan–Boltzmann constant. They even use the dash for Hale–Bopp in their references, though I suspect that if we followed up, we'd find that many were published with a hyphen. That is, they punctuate according to their in-house MOS, which is s.t. people here have been arguing we're not allowed to do (esp. in article titles, claiming it violates COMMONNAME). — kwami (talk) 18:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Comment. Hale-Bopp carries a hyphen because the IAU says that it's spelled with a hyphen. Hyphenated surnames have the hyphen replaced with a space, like Singer Brewster, discovered by Singer-Brewster, or cut in half, like Bally-Clayton (1968d C/1968 Q1), discovered by Bally-Urban and Clayton. Some people had already moved a couple of featured comet articles via RM. Kwami (who is posting right above me by pure chance) then moved dozens of comet articles to dashed articles, then proposed "Hale-Bopp" for the MOS draft as an example of a dash names. He didn't mention that all comet articles were hyphenated only a few weeks ago, or that he had moved dozens of himself a couple of days ago without discussion. Months later I realized the problem and I tried to correct it, but the usual suspects stonewalled the change. Now Kwami has been desyosped for making massive moves against consensus. Maybe it would be time to discuss comet hyphens again..... Or should I wait until Noetica is topic banned for stonewalling and edit warring? --Enric Naval (talk) 18:45, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

And Enric Naval posts pictures of cats he's killed on his user page. If you can provide a source for the IAU rule, great, but that would simply be their in-house style. We don't copy the in-house styles of our sources any more than they do, as the result would be chaotic. Punctuation varies from source to source, and is even adapted in references and quotations.

The IAU convention, BTW, is similar to typewriter hyphenation. It's because astronomers send the IAU telegrams of their discoveries, and telegrams can't handle dashes. — kwami (talk) 19:14, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

The IAU has a comet naming guideline, not a style guideline. It's the only body that can name comets, and its naming decisions are internationally accepted. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:29, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Valuable link. Although I can't help an impression that the document deals more with naming than with typography. I wouldn't be surprised if its authors did not understand a difference between a hyphen and a dash. Astronomers hardly ever are typesetters... kashmiri 12:06, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

What it says is that spaces or hyphens are used: "each individual name is to be separated by a hyphen", and it is recommended that no more than two names be included. If someone has a hyphenated name that hyphen is replaced with a space or one of the two names only used. So that eliminates the ambiguity of Hale-Lennard-Jones - it would be either Hale-Lennard Jones or Hale-Lennard or Hale-Jones. Apteva (talk) 14:54, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

And the comet names were always announced in circulars, printed in paper, with diacritics, umlauts, scientific symbols, minus and plus signs, superscripts, and French letters like ç. The telegrams were coded and illegible, and they never contained any comet name. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:41, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't know whether this has to be a joke or what. This is a printout of a French-language news release from 1920 regarding the position of an observed new planet. Nothing about comets, naming, etc. See, basic knowledge of French prevents being misled by comments like yours. kashmiri 12:02, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The IAU circulars communicate the discovery of all types of astronomical bodies: stars, asteroids, minor planets, comets, etc. as well as observations of interest, corrections, etc. Here you have the printed IAU circulars announcing 1919 g (Skjellerup) and Reid 1921a and Väisälä 1944b. More recent version are available by subscription. As you can see, the official names have always been announced in printed circulars, which don't have any restriction for diacritics, umlauts, dashes, scientific symbols, etc. Decades before the circulars started, they were announced in printed journal Astronomische Nachrichten, which also didn't have any restriction in characters. Telegrams didn't play any role in name announcements, they were just for quick announcements of discoveries. At discovery time comets only had a provisional designation like 1944b (second comet discovered in 1944). --Enric Naval (talk) 16:27, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure about the coded and illegible part. The IAU recently, though, asserted[3] using capital letters for planets, etc., but it is not clear if that extends to comets. Hale-Bopp for example could simply be certified as being "the comet Hale-Bopp", which provides no insight into capitalization of comet. The examples given were Solar System and Earth's equator.

It was noted that the naming of all planets so far has long predated the existence of the IAU. I think that rather than naming things they standardize names and certify them, and are an arbitor, but they do not make up the names, or sell names.

The IAU frequently receives requests from individuals who want to buy stars or name stars after other persons. Some commercial enterprises purport to offer such services for a fee. However, such "names" have no formal or official validity whatever.

Based on the survey of google book results below it is clear that the endash conclusion in 2011 took an extreme minority viewpoint and put the MOS in conflict with WP:TITLE. I suggest that it be reversed in light of new information, and that the examples of wars and comets with endash be removed from the MOS and replaced with hyphens. Whether the use of hyphens will remain dominant or, like Kiev could be replaced with a new spelling remains to be seen. WP is not a crystal ball and does not try to reflect what people should be doing or what they might be doing but simply what they are doing. Just as Kiev remains the overwhelming spelling in common usage, Comet Hale-Bopp (with a hyphen) is the dominant spelling for the comet Hale-Bopp (correctly not capitalized when preceded by the), along with airports and wars which have achieved proper name status and if there are any other names with endash or hyphen they, like Comet Hale-Bopp can be tested to see if they use an endash or a hyphen in common usage, but the MOS does not need to pretend that endash rules apply inside names, because that is not the interpretation of the vast majority of book editors. Should that change, clearly WP would eventually reflect that change as well, but certainly can not be expected to precede that change. To do so would be original research. Apteva (talk) 13:49, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The IAU decides who were the original discoverers and in which order they made the discovery, and the spelling of the comet name (the thing with modifying the hyphenated surnames). The IAU also fixates the transliterations of foreign names so they are spelled in only one way by everyone, although I can only give a example for a Moon crater(1). The IAU can ignore suggestions, see what happened to Hugh Percy Wilkins. If you disagree with a naming decision you can only appeal to the IAU itself. Most importantly, you can't assign arbitrary names to comes that you discovered yourself, the IAU will decide the name for you whether you like or not.

(1) The Far Side of the Moon: A Photographic Guide. 5.1 Identification of Named Features. Spelling of Feature Names. The IAU has fixated the transliteration of "Tsiolkovskiy (crater)", which is named after a Russian rocket scientist. You could drop the last "i" and still have a valid transliteration of the guy's name from the Russian language, but then it wouldn't be the crater's correct name. The IAU standardized all Moon crater names in 1975, and it only accepts names of dead people, except for Apollo astronauts; some old names were retained, others were changed [4]. In 2008 the MESSENGER probe mapped Mercury, and the IAU made rules for the names of it surface features: the biggest basin received a unique name, cliffs were named after famous ships, and craters were named after "'deceased artists, musicians, painters, and authors who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as art historically significant figures for more than 50 years.". The IAU approved names for each feature and then published official maps.[5][6]. The IAU can pull this stuff because it's the naming authority in astronomy matters.

Q: Who is legally responsible for naming objects in the sky?

A: The IAU is the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and surface features on them. And names are not sold, but assigned according to internationally accepted rules. "Buying Star Names", IAU's FAQ

(...) rules established by the IAU, which emerged as the arbiter of planetary names and coordinate systems during the early years of space exploration. Back then, standardization helped to prevent the Solar System from being plastered with conflicting sets of names used by Soviet and US scientists. These days, the tensions are less nationalistic and more interdisciplinary: a dust-up between the geologists who tend to lead planetary missions and the astronomers who comprise much of the IAU. “Why should I let astronomers name things just because they’re on another planet?” asks Mike Malin, a geologist and principal investigator for the mast camera on NASA’s Curiosity rover mission, which has generated its own conflict with the IAU over the naming of a feature at its Martian landing site. "Space missions trigger map wars. Planetary explorers rebel against nomenclature protocols". Nature 22 August 2012

To avoid further disputes as proud pioneers sought to thank benefactors, curry favour or merely indulge themselves, the IAU went on to establish working groups to set rules and conventions for nomenclature.

, Procedures now make sure that mountains on Mercury are named with words for 'hot' in various languages, canyons on Venus christened after goddesses and small craters on Mars twinned with villages on Earth. Just last month, a 39-kilometre-wide Martian crater was named Moanda, after a town in Gabon. "The Name Game". Nature 22 August 2012

By that time, tiny P4 should have a real name. "We're tossing around some ideas," says Showalter, "but the name has to come out of Greek mythology associated with Hades and the underworld." That's according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which formally approves the names of heavenly objects — and which has strict and sometimes arcane guidelines for what's permitted. Underworld myths are the rule for moons of Pluto; for moons of Uranus, it must be characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope — specifically Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock." That required Showalter to learn the verses well. "I'm the discoverer of two moons of Uranus," he says. "We named them Cupid and Mab."

The IAU is also responsible for the decision in 2006 to demote tiny Pluto, just one-half the size of Earth's moon, to the status of dwarf planet. "Pass Out the Cigars! Pluto Is a Papa" Time, Science section, 25 July 2011

So who's in charge of naming solar system objects that are discovered now? Since its organization in 1919, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has been in charge of naming all celestial objects. When an astronomer discovers an object, or wants to name a surface feature, they can submit a suggestion to the IAU, and the IAU either approves it or suggests a different name. Since we don't think there are any undiscovered planets, the IAU focuses on the naming of moons, surface features, asteroids, and comets and has websites about naming conventions for each. "Curious About Astronomy? Ask An Astronomer: Who named the planets and who decides what to name them?" Astronomy department of Cornell university.

The only official body which can give names to astronomical objects is the International Astronomical Union (IAU). (...) All official names have to be adopted by the IAU. There are certain rules which have to be followed in the official names allocated to different types of object; some of these are outlined below. (...) Comets. Comets are named after their discoverers. (...) In 1994, the International Astronomical Union updated their mechanism for naming comets (...) For more information on comet designations, please visit the International Astronomy Union website (...) "The naming of stars" Royal Observatory, Greenwich

So, is it clear now that the IAU's naming guidelines are not an "in-house style"? And that the IAU is the only body with the power of naming astronomical stuff and defining the exact spelling of each name? --Enric Naval (talk) 22:59, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

The words "The MoS presents Wikipedia's house style" need to be nixed too. WP is not a publishing house and does not have a house style. WP is not a monolithic organization under the command of one person, even though some editors would prefer that. There are many styles that are appropriate, and the MOS explains what some of them are. It is not either inclusive nor exclusive. Editors refer to it for suggestions, but use their own common sense in applying what it says. Britannica, on the other hand, is a publishing house, and does have a house style. The words "house style" are not common language and have no reason for being used, even if we were a monolithic organization, and even if we did have a "house style", which we do not. Apteva (talk) 17:08, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Let's not expand the scope of this section so much, or we will get nothing done. We were talking about comet names: the capital "c" in "Comet", the hyphens, and the proper name status. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:02, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Above, Enric Naval ignores the difference between naming and styling, and between official names and common names. The IAU has a brief style guide in which they "recommend" capitalization of names of individual astronomical objects (just as many other organizations have style guides that recommend capitalizing the important items in their respective fields). "The IAU formally recommends that the initial letters of the names of individual astronomical objects should be printed as capitals" as their web page says, referencing their style guide which clarifies that this is "in IAU publications". If they have a recommendation for how the general public should choose to style the names, I'm not sure where it is. And if they have info that says "comet" should come before or after the name, I'm not seeing that, either; it's clear that in common names, Halley's comet is more common the comet Halley, but others go the other way. Does IAU control this? I don't think so. Do they have an opinion on en dashes? Like many style guides, theirs doesn't say anything about that. Dicklyon (talk) 17:45, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

(I'll comment on hyphens. I won't comment on comet/Comet.) The IAU's comet naming guideline, not styling and not an in-house style, says that discoverer names are separated by hyphens. And says to remove hyphens from hyphenated surnames to avoid confusions with said hyphens, like Singer Brewster, discovered by Singer-Brewster, or drop part of the name hyphenated surname, like Bally-Clayton, discovered by Bally-Urban and Clayton. Thus, these compounded names are not built with standard English rules, they are built with IAU's naming rules, which give explicit instructions for using hyphens and spaces to separate the name in a manner that doesn't cause any confusion about how many discoverers the comet has. (Thus, it's not necessary to use dashes to separate surnames, because there is no possible confusion with any hyphenated surname in any comet name, past or future.) --Enric Naval (talk) 18:02, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

First a clarification. The IAU is not referring to an internal guideline about how they should internally recommend capitalizing or recommend using spaces and hyphens - they are the final arbitrator as to what the "official" name of a comet or planet is. They use those guidelines in helping them make those decisions, and they publish their answers. Bally-Urban was certainly asked would you like to use Bally or Urban because you can not use both. Singer-Brewster could have been asked, but the guideline permits using up to two names. Some names go on much longer. Secondly while there is a difference between the official name and the common name of many things, in neither case do comets use a hyphen. Common usage is tested, as it was here, by checking as many sources as possible and determining the most common usage. Scholarly sources could tend to prefer the official name, but not necessarily. Common names could tend to prefer comet Halley or Halley's comet, or Halley's Comet. It is not clear whether the IAU is even specifying whether comet goes before or after the name and is simply addressing the variable portion of the name - the word planet is not a part of the name planet Earth, why would comet be part of the name comet Hale-Bopp? It is completely acceptable, in context, to use Hale-Bopp. The dominant convention though, is clear, for most comets, it comes first. But the MOS is not the place for establishing title rules. That domain is at WP:TITLE, which has, like the MOS, 70 subpages for assistance. Apteva (talk) 19:29, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

WP doesn't care what IAU wants to do stylistically. WP is not an astronomy journal. IAU allegedly asserting that its stylistic decision to favor hyphens over dashes (I would bet good money they did not in fact draw any such distinction, and are only drawing a distinction between using a space and using a dash that they have misnamed a hyphen, because they're astronomers, not grammarians; Apteva's own post of 14:54, 16 October 2012 (UTC) supports my view here) is actually a naming matter not a style matter is simply an alleged assertion and not one that WP is magically bound to recognize when it defies common sense and conflicts with our business as usual of creating an encyclopedia. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 22:15, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Did you read all the quotes I posted above? The IAU has a naming guideline, not styling. It decides the names and how they are written, and how foreign names are transliterated from other languages. I have seen several sources explaining that comet names use hyphens, and how hyphenated surnames need to have the hyphens removed so they don't conflict with the other hyphens. I have never seen any source saying that the IAU really meant to use dashes and not hyphens. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:28, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

It would be possible to name a comet in a way that would use a hyphen; Hale–Bopp is named in a way in which Wikipedia's current consensus style guidelines would use endash. Is there a source that says the IAU was distinguishing between hyphens and endashes? Or do they not mention endashes, and perhaps were they just using "hyphen" the way many non-Wikipedia sources do, as a catch-all for hyphen/minus/endash/half-an-emdash? -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:10, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I still don't see any argument beyond "IAU only sets the styling", which is patently incorrect according to multiple reliable sources, and "IAU meant a dash", which is not supported by any reliable source and directly contradicts a few of them that make explicit mention of this rule. So, are we going to remove Hale-Bopp as an example of a compounded name in English. Maybe we should rename all counterexamples lik the airport names:

• Singer Brewster → Singer-Brewster

--Enric Naval (talk) 13:20, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

The fact that Hale–Bopp is so often found with en dash in sources, including astronomy journals, is strong evidence that the IAU naming guidelines are not being interpreted as styling guidelines in either astronomical or general publications. Dicklyon (talk) 18:07, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

I looked at the first 50 results in google books, and only 3 use a dash[7]. Even if you discard books that use wikipedia material, self-published books, uncheckable books, and books from suspicious publishers, there is only a tiny minority of books that choose to use a dash, 3 versus 40. Google news also show a supermajority of hyphens[8]. I think that this is much stronger evidence that astronomical and general publications actually look at the IAU when they make style decisions. And, yes, you can find as many isolated examples as you want, but they are still a tiny minority when you look at the whole of publications. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:52, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

I thought that y'all might be interested in [9]. AgnosticAphid talk 00:13, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

This [10] second requested move is much more relevant to this particular discussion.AgnosticAphid talk 18:30, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Apteva has claimed that this discussion has resulted in a clear agreement for using the hyphen instead of the en-dash for the comet article. I do not read any such clear consensus; participants other than Apteva, please correct me if there is a new consensus. -- JHunterJ (talk) 01:59, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I think he's saying that since nobody bothered to argue with Enric Naval's last point, we must have all accepted it. That's wrong. I didn't bother to reply since he had ignored where I pointed out "including astronomy journals". You can see what I was getting at here, where a healthy percentage of scholarly papers, largely in scientific and astronomy journals, style this one with the en dash. It would not be appropriate to declare them all "wrong" for not following the IAU's style on this. Dicklyon (talk) 03:17, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

That is how I read it as well: that no new consensus had been reached, but that the participants did not restate the responses above the last point again below the last point. Thanks. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:00, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I would not characterize one out of ten a healthy percentage. I have looked at the first 500, though, and out of them slightly less than 1/4 use an endash, with the vast majority, over 3/4, using a hyphen. It would behoove Wikipedia to not intentionally create a conflict between one guideline and another. Would anyone be willing to allow comets to defer to the dominant spelling of using a hyphen, as stipulated by the IAU? My preference is to have an encyclopedia provide accurate and correct information, although that may be a strange concept to propose. As to capitalization, there is more variation, but it appears that the IAU treats comets like planets, the word comet is not a part of the name, so it is comet Hale-Bopp, just as it is planet Mars, and planet Earth. Hale-Bopp is interchangeable everywhere with comet Hale-Bopp, much less so Halley's and Halley's comet. Common usage may indicate Halley's Comet - dictionaries are split, with Oxford English having the entry say Halley's comet, and Oxford American saying Halley's Comet. In books, Halley's comet has been dominant up until the most recent siting, although each time it comes around there has been the same spike in ill-informed spellings, which I would not recommend Wikipedia emulate.[11] Apteva (talk) 18:23, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

So, most astronomy journals (~75%) use hyphens. Percentages in books and news articles are even higher. I don't know where Dicklyon is seeing any "healthy" percentage of dashes. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:11, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Survey

Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion

Survey-hyphen/endash Prefer hyphens for comets Prefer endash for hyphenated comets Prefer endash or hyphen as appropriate, for comets or for anything else, per the Wikipedia style guidelines It would be possible to name a comet in a way that would use a hyphen; Hale–Bopp is named in a way in which Wikipedia's current consensus style guidelines would use endash. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:01, 20 November 2012 (UTC) No preference Survey-upper/lowercase Prefer lower case comet Prefer upper case Comet No preference

Post-survey break

Please address the arguments I presented. The last I fell into the trap of making a "survey", aka a poll, and one person presented a series of flawed and vague arguments, and the usual suspects piled up in support and stonewalled the change --Enric Naval (talk) 22:04, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

It would be possible to name a comet in a way that would use a hyphen; Hale–Bopp is named in a way in which Wikipedia's current consensus style guidelines would use endash. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:01, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Following that logic, we should blindly use "Comet Singer-Brewster" despite all the sources explaining the lack of a hyphen? Why aren't we doing that? Oh, right, because that's clearly preposterous. You don't "style" a name when reliable sources say explicitly that it's spelled in a specific way because of specific orthographic reasons (to avoid confusions with hyphenated surnames). --Enric Naval (talk) 13:48, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Invoking words like "blindly" don't help the discussion. We do not style spaces as either hyphens or endashes; I agree that would be clearly preposterous. So I might stand corrected; it appears the IAU will only use one type of punctuation in its names, to connect two names and not to modify one name with an adjective or adjectival noun, so we should continue to use endashes for all comets (or at least all comets with a common name that follows IAU naming). -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:02, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

"to modify one name with an adjective or adjectival noun", sorry, I'm lost, how is this related to "Comet Hale-Bopp"? We are not talking about "Hale—Bopp's comet", which is a different constructions and not the actual name of the comet. --Enric Naval (talk) 10:20, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Who brought up Hale—Bopp's comet? I'm lost as well. My point was that the IAU apparently isn't going to assign names with dashes that that WP style would use hyphens instead of endashes for (although there's always the hypothetical possibility that common usage might vary from IAU for some comet(s)). My earlier point is that the IAU apparently does not distinguish between hyphens and endashes, or address endashes at all, while WP does. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:54, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

The IAU seems to distinguish hyphens pretty well: "each individual name is to be separated by a hyphen (but family surnames with two or more words separated by either spaces or hyphens are to be distinguished in comet names by single spaces only between each surname word -- although, for simplicity, the discoverer shall in such cases also be given the option to choose one main word from his or her name to represent the surname on the comet, with such choosing strongly encouraged)" IAU Comet Naming Guideline

The hyphen rule is repeated and explained by several RS, none of them ever mentions about any confusion with dashes. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:34, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I hope you understand what I'm saying and are just deflecting it because it doesn't suit your conclusion. In order to distinguish between two things, one must mention those two things. If the IAU doesn't mention any dashes other than hyphens, it hasn't distinguished hyphens from endashes. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:53, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

They are talking about hyphens in relationship with hyphenated surnames. According to the International Comet Quarterly discoverer names were already separated by hyphens back in 1886![12]. You can check that they use a hyphen (not a dash) in contemporary astronomy journals, in English, in Italian, in German and in French. All in print journals that are capable of printing dashes, superscripts, scientific symbols, etc. Back when they wrote the naming guidelines, hyphens in comet names had been a tradition for at least 117 years. Maybe it didn't cross their mind that someone could think that they were Eonglish-impaired enough confuse a hyphen when a dash?

I have compiled a long list of sources over the last months. Sorry for the awful formatting. Newspaper articles, astronomy books and journals, popular astronomy books, all sort of stuff. All sources mention hyphens, hyphenation, linking with hyphens, etc. In a span of more than 120 years, there is not a single source mentioning or implying that the IAU confused a hyphen with a dash or viceversa. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:08, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

The use of en dash in Barnard–Hartwig also dates from 1886, as here. Just depends on the editor's style preference. In German, a spaced hyphen is also found, as here, indicating not the usual hyphen. Dicklyon (talk) 23:54, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Right: there is not a single source mentioning or implying that the IAU has distinguished between hyphen and dash. Where many, many sources conflate hyphens and dashes or ignore one or the other of them, Wikipedia styles some as explicit hyphens and some as en-dashes. -- JHunterJ (talk) 20:57, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I think I have met my burden of proof by presenting dozens of sources that unambiguously support that comet names have been hyphenated for more than a century. I couldn't find any reports of confusion with dashes or with any other punctuation mark. Above I provided sources saying that the IAU is the ultimate decider for all astronomical names in the universe. And here you are claiming that the IAU can't tell a hyphen from a dash and that nobody has noticed for over a century, except you. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:22, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I didn't say they can't tell a hyphen from an endash, I said they haven't distinguished them. They may have no pressing need; the hyphen may serve them adequately, whereas WP has for some reason opted to distinguish hyphens from endashes. Simple. -- JHunterJ (talk) 03:31, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

My preference is to prohibit dashes from titles, but there is a huge difference between distinguishing between endashes and hyphens and misusing endashes for hyphens. Give someone a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Give someone a hammer and a screwdriver and it is absurd to try to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail or a hammer to drive in a screw (though that does sometimes work). State that half of the population has an IQ of 100, and if someone disagrees you can immediately put them into the lower half. So if we did prohibit dashes from titles this problem would be a lot less of a problem, because it would be only a matter of editing instead of moving articles. The MOS does not determine article titles though, or content, only how to portray that content. It does not and can not tell editors to misspell words, such as telling them that Hale-Bopp is spelled with an endash, because it is not spelled with an endash. I consider myself to be one of the roughly less than 1% of editors who can distinguish between an endash and a hyphen, which is why there has been very little participation in this discussion. Apteva (talk) 06:52, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Comet names explicitly use a hyphen, which is a specific punctuation mark. They have used hyphens for over a century and it's explicitly indicated in dozens of sources. A dash is a different mark and it's not mentioned anywhere in said sources. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

That it's not mentioned anywhere is my point. Styles that lump dashes and hyphens together would have no need to mention dashes if they specify when to use hyphens. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:47, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

You keep claiming that the IAU conflates dashes and hyphens together, with not a single iota of evidence. And again, it's naming, not styling, they specify the punctuation mark that has to appear between the components of the words. They don't say "you should write it like this", they say "it is written like this". --Enric Naval (talk) 13:51, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I claim that the IAU has not explicitly distinguished the two, and they haven't. If Wikipedia styles their hyphens as endashes, that's a style choice, not a misspelling. You keep claiming that it is incorrect naming and not styling, with not a single iota of evidence. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:02, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

• If 25% of sources out there use dashes, that is healthy. We should follow our style guide. Tony (talk) 10:33, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

• 75% of scholar sources sounds a lot healthier. And over 90% in books and newpapers sounds even healthier! Don't you agree? --Enric Naval (talk) 15:34, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

• Our style guide did not address airports, bridges, or comets, and made a fallacious suggestion for Mexican-American War, that someone would think it was a war of Mexican-Americans, instead of between Mexicans and Americans (neglecting the obvious that Mexicans are Americans), something that would never happen no matter what punctuation was used. That fallacy led to the even worse travesty of using endashes in bridges, airports and now comets, where there is not a shred of commonsense to use an endash. It just keeps getting worse and worse and more and more bizarre. Fix the original problem. Spell Mexican American War the way everyone else does (98%), and this whole malarkey goes away. The MOS should be reflecting the things that most people do, and not making its own rules about things, and should be staying away from making rules on issues where there are more than one way to do things (this is not one of them - this is an issue where a rule that does not apply has been applied to spell something incorrectly). Apteva (talk) 17:45, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

• News sources seldom use a style that includes en dashes for anything, so have no bearing here. Books are 20% en dash for Hale–Bopp. See below. Dicklyon (talk) 20:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

• Refuting Apteva and Enric Naval –

Apteva has been pushing the theories that en dashes are not used in proper names; that they are not used in airport names; and that they are not used in comet names; and other variations. Enric Naval has joined in supporting him in the case of comets; not sure about the others. The claim seems to be that reliable sources use en dashes in two-name attributive compounds in comet names so infrequently that there must be an underlying rule, habit, convention, law, or decision to avoid en dashes in such cases, and that WP must respect that prohibition.

But where is their evidence that reliable sources interpret the IAU's hyphen-based comet naming as a prohibition to style those names with en dashes? Perhaps they could show that the frequency of use of en dash in comet names, or airport names, or proper names in general, is signfiicantly less than the frequency of en dashes in non-proper attributive compounds of name pairs (such as in Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease), or significantly less than the occurence in other parallel pairs (love–hate relationship). Or they could find specific publications that would use en dash in Creutzfeldt–Jakob (or whatever), but hyphen in Hale-Bopp. So far, I don't believe they have presented evidence of either sort. If they do find such evidence of lower frequency of en dash usage in certain situations, then we can entertain a motion to amend the MOS to say to use hyphen instead of en dash in certain types of name compounds.

Lacking such a proposal based on evidence, all we have is an annoying level of continuing disruption based on opinions and imagined rules. In many cases, their imagination seems to be exacerbated by their inability to find or recognize en dashes in books, as I've pointed out to both of them several times. For example, Enric claims only 3 of 50 books in Google book search use en dash in Hale–Bopp. But in this book search I find these 10 that use en dash in the first 50: [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22].

This 20% is a not an unusual rate of use of a style with en dashes in parallel attributive compounds, proper name, comet, or otherwise. If it's a bit lower than some, it's likely because some astronomers do take the IAU literally and style with a hyphen where they might have used an en dash otherwise. It's hard to say without more evidence. But still, 20% use of en dash in this comet name is a "healthy" percentage. Certainly it would be ridiculous to declare these many books "wrong" in styling the coment name as they do, especially in light of the many scholarly articles and journals (including Icarus; Nature; Earth, Moon and Planets; Planetary and Space Science; Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) that style it that way, too.

To declare the WP:MOS style to be "wrong" here, based on no evidence, is baseless. Dicklyon (talk) 20:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Kindly remove any reference to any specific editor. Doing so is completely inappropriate. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and has a responsibility to its readers to provide correct and accurate information. No one can argue that comets are not correctly spelled as they are spelled by the IAU - with spaces and hyphens. No one can argue that it would improve the encyclopedia to misspell them with any other form of punctuation. It is easy, though, to find out why some editors want to spell them with an endash. It all goes back to the fallacious argument that spelling Mexican-American War with a hyphen would indicate that it was a war of Mexican-Americans, instead of a war between Mexicans and Americans, which is wrong for two reasons, one English does not make any sense - idioms often have meanings that simply need to be memorized, and secondly because most sources do use a hyphen instead of an endash, and if the MOS did decide that an endash should be used it would introduce a conflict between this guideline and WP:TITLE. I did over 7,000 edits, with none to the MOS or it's talk page. But when someone starts misspelling things and using a misinterpretation of the MOS to do it, I get real interested in the MOS. Apteva (talk) 06:52, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

As far as I know, the only one pushing a theory of "misspelling" is you. Nobody is saying that sources that use hyphen in such compounds are "wrong"; they simply have a different style, where the role of the "long hyphen" as the Cambridge guide to English usage calls it, is served by the hyphen. In WP, the MOS says we prefer the en dash to serve that role. So when you say "No one can argue that comets are not correctly spelled as they are spelled by the IAU", I agree, there's nothing there that anyone would argue about. If there's a "fallacious argument" you want people to consider, a link to it would be useful. Dicklyon (talk) 19:02, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

([23], [24], [25] are the same book from different editors.)

>80% is still far more healthy that <20%..... And, of course, the typical name-throwing by Dicklyon: all those journals use sometimes hyphen and sometimes dash, with most journals using hyphen almost always, like Earth, Moon and Planets [26]. Planetary and Space Science is about 50-50 [27] Nature has 50-50. Only Icarus uses dashes more often than hyphens, and only by a small margin (32 out of 60). Of course, a proportion of >80 means that most journals use mostly hyphen. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Enric, what you've demonstrated is that the styling choice of en dash versus hyphen in many journals is probably not controlled by the journal's editorial staff, but by the authors. With 25% of all articles using the en dash, and possibly some journals enforcing the IAU hyphen style, the proportion of authors choosing to use en dash is probably higher. Certainly none of them are falling into it by default, or because they can't find their preferred choice on their keyboard, as many of those using hyphen probably are. The point is, the IAU has not imposed a style on the field, either in general publications, or in specialist journals, where the prevalance of styling with en dash for Hale–Bopp is not so different from other things that one might style that way. The hyphen remains the most common, the default, and the least common denominator styling for those who don't know or care about the difference, and for some who do. But that is not a reason to say that the en dash is "wrong". Dicklyon (talk) 21:41, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Less than 20% of articles. And more original research and opinion about styling, when I showed with reliable sources that it's a naming problem, and that the name uses a specific punctuation mark. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

It's not forbidding me from turning left! The sign doesn't "distinguish" between left and right!

Unclear who this is addressed to:

I don't think you realize how preposterous your argument is. According to you, the IAU should have said: "and by a hyphen we actually mean a hyphen, like we have been doing for over a century in all compounded comet names, as explicitly indicated many times before in astronomy articles and books; not a dash, which is a different punctuation mark with different usages, and which has never been used in any comet name, and which, unlike the hyphen, has never been mentioned as part of a comet name in any source". --Enric Naval (talk) 14:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm unclear on who you're saying has proposed something about what the IAU should do or should have done. I've only argued that what they've done has had little effect on styling usage, as far as I tell. Your "over a century" also ignores the fact that I pointed out above that en dash usage in comet names dates from the same year (search up for 1886). Dicklyon (talk) 21:50, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

By the way, your sign example may be lost on most Americans. We don't use signs like that, where a positive (the right arrow) is taken as a prohibition of alternatives; we'd have a "NO LEFT TURN" sign instead, or a left arrow with a red circle/slash; or "ONLY" on a black&white right-arrow sign. Styles vary. Dicklyon (talk) 21:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

The link above to an 1886 publication using an endash also uses a hyphen for the same comet. Click next to see the second reference.[28] No one is suggesting that no one has ever used an endash for a comet, but what is being suggested is that it is less correct than to use a hyphen. I do not see any possible argument against that supposition, and not correcting the MOS is ludicrous. The advice to capitalize the word comet is also not correct, as it appears that the word comet in the name is the same as the word planet in the name of a planet - not a part of the name. On the other hand, system, is a part of the name Solar System, as indicated in the example provided by the IAU.[29] "An initial capital letter is not required when the name of a person (or object) is used as an adjective or as the name of unit, unless it forms part of the name of an individual object (Isaac Newton Telescope)." Since comet is the name of the unit, it is not capitalized. Thus it is planet Mars, planet Earth, planet Saturn, Halley's comet, and comet Hale-Bopp. There is not consensus to follow this practice on Wikipedia for Halley's comet, even though it is correct, as Halley's is not commonly used separately from Halley's comet. Apteva (talk) 23:53, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah. You can see a full copy of the 1886 publication with the hyphen in p. 208 [30]. And, of course, you are again cherrypicking one example that fits your position, and tiptoeing around the dozens and dozens that don't. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:21, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Modification to MOS:IDENTITY

A few weeks ago, there was a proposal at WP:VPP to modify the wording of MOS:IDENTITY, specifically Point 2; the archived discussion is here. It gained some traction, but it died down without any kind of resolution, so I want to raise it again. The specific change being sought is;

"Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the gendered nouns, pronouns, and possessive adjectives that reflect that person's gender at the time of notability as reflected within the prevalence of mainstream reliable sources. Identity changes thereafter should be dealt with chronologically but should always follow the conventions used with prevalence in mainstream sources."

Instead of copying over the rationale, the link to the archive shows Berean Hunter's rationale, and other examples are provided in the thread. If people think this would be better discussed elsewhere, that's fine, but since the waters at VPP have been tested this seems like the most logical place. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:49, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I made a similar proposal back in May here. I agree with Blade that we need to follow what mainstream sources say rather than get ahead of these sources by making a judgment based on an individual's statements. GabrielF (talk) 18:11, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Does this mean we'll have to change Template:MOS-TW?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:40, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, it would. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:46, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

What would the template's words have to change to?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:48, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Hadn't thought about it... that'll obviously need some work. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:55, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Can you clear up the exact meaning of this proposed rule?? Is it any similar to the following:

Trans women who are notable for being trans women should be referred to as she/her. However, trans women notable primarily for an event before the operation of surgery for a reason that has nothing to do with being transsexual should be referred to as he/him as if they were cisgender men. Georgia guy (talk) 22:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Almost. The first sentence is right, but the idea is to refer to, say, Laura Jane Grace as "he" when he was identifying as Tom Gabel and "she" after coming out in public as a she. Make sense? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 00:10, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

You mean, we should assume that trans women actually were men, not women trapped in men's bodies, before the operation?? Georgia guy (talk) 00:13, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

To couch it in less loaded, more policy-based language, it's to avoid outright misleading revisionist history such as "she captained her tennis team at Horace Mann" (in the article on Renée Richards); specifics are in the linked VPP conversation. We at Wikipedia aren't here to play psychologists and pass judgment on whether or not they were really men or just women all along, we're here to report facts; in the cases of Grace and Richards, among others, they were notable under different names and sexes and our articles should reflect that. And this also works the other way too; the article on Andreas Krieger should be treated the same (and as of writing is actually a good example of what I'm shooting for). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:34, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Notable under different names and sexes?? This phrase actually does imply the statement I was asking above whether we should assume. Georgia guy (talk) 19:14, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

The sex the person was commonly believed to be at the time. I think this is a slam-dunk. We do not — we must not — take a position on whether a person's "real" sex is. The choice to retroactively apply a sex change to previous notable events is nothing short of advocacy of a particular point of view; it must stop. --Trovatore (talk) 20:02, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

And likewise the choice to refer to people by the genders to which they were misassigned at birth is also advocacy of a point of view -- it's a claim that the person writing the article knows better than the subject what their name and gender are. Stealth Munchkin (talk) 01:12, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

In the case where we have the person saying "I am gender X, I have always been gender X, and things were misreported by the media". I agree with you. We rarely have such a statement. Quite often the person THEMSELVES represented themselves as the other gender at times in the past. Saying they did not is a lie, and unenclyclopedic, regardless of what they may have felt. Gaijin42 (talk) 01:43, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

In the case of Laura Jane Grace, we have someone who actively sought to be and maintain a public image as a man; rewriting the article to state otherwise (as some people attempted to do before someone hacked out a temporary solution) is downright inaccurate. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:21, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

This section can be archived, just like any section of a talk page. I remember from 2004-2006 the "Georgia moving poll" which was wasn't archived for a long time. (It was at Talk:Georgia; now it's in an archive.) Can we put this discussion in a similar area so that it won't be archived too quickly?? Georgia guy (talk) 17:00, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Not sure... anyone familiar with this talkpage have suggestions? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:15, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Think I've got it... now on with the discussion. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:31, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I support this change. This issue is also coming up in The Wachowskis article as Larry/Lana has now come out after transitioning male->female. Obviously most notable for events when she was identified explicitly as male "The Wachowski Brothers" etc. However, renewed notability with the recent release of Cloud Atlas where she is doing interviews etc as Lana. General lede/summary information should use the prefered gender/name. However, historical information should use the gender used by that person at the time, as reported in reliable sources. it is WP:OR to assume we know what they considered their gender in the past; WP:OR to assume they considered themselves "trapped" etc, unless they have explicitly said so. Not everyone's LBGT path is the same. The guidance provided in the current MOS leads to innacurate information - the given example of "He gave birth->He became a parent" in particular is a loss of precision unacceptable for an encyclopdia. There are a multitude of ways to become a parent (father, give birth, adopt, just take responsibility for, etc) and removing a factual statement because the gender doesnt make sense is inaccurate. Gaijin42 (talk) 16:18, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps we can add something to say prefer neutral language wherever possible where the historical information disagrees with current preference, or add qualifying statements such as "John so and so, who prior to their gender transition identifed as Jane, gave birth" etc. Gaijin42 (talk) 16:36, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

We should keep the current rule, in which we use the individual's most recent preferred pronoun. If a source from 1986 says that singer Crystal Zing was born in Nashville, but Zing later digs up her birth certificate and finds out that she was really born in Memphis and only grew up in Nashville, then we should no continue to say that she was born in Nashville, even though an otherwise reliable source says that she was. That source was wrong. It is the same idea with people who undergo gender transition, like L. Wachowski. The sources (like most of the rest of the world) made a good-faith mistake in referring to Wachowski as male. More accurate information has come to light showing that Wachowski is female. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:32, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

You are making an assumption that you know that Wachowski considered themselves female at that point in the past (and in this case when they explicitly identified themselves repeatedly as "Wachowski Brothers". Not everyone who is trans has felt that way their entire life. You might not claim Zing was born in Nashville. But you might say that she SAID she was born in Nashville until X, which was true before the birth certificate, and will be true forever. To say that they always claimed to be born in Memphis is inaccurate. Gaijin42 (talk) 01:07, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Not everyone who is trans has not felt that way their entire life. If our aim is to respect trans people's subjective experiences, shouldn't we allow for the possibility that some trans people will make statements along the lines of, "I have always been a woman," and respect that when they do? On a related note, while it is necessarily the case that trans people found their identities before being public about them, it is not necessarily the case that the prevalence of "mainstream, reliable sources" will reflect their identities in a timely manner. Indeed in the case of some trans people -- I have in mind certain historical figures and trans people whose only mention in mainstream media is in obituaries in which they have been misgendered -- this will never happen. -- Marie Paradox (talk) 02:38, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

This is an encyclopedia, not an LGBT publication; we don't rewrite history to pretend peoples' previous names/identities didn't exist. Just as we don't refer to Eminem (I can't believe I'm using him as an example for anything) by his stage name until he himself used it, so we should do the same here. It's one thing when someone wasn't notable at all before transitioning (c.f. Andrea James, which is completely fine), articles on these people wouldn't be affected. However, in extreme cases we get articles like Dee Palmer; due to the current rule, the article is misleading and almost unreadable. We're referring to Palmer as "she" 35 years before Palmer transitioned. Palmer is almost exclusively notable for having played in Jethro Tull, and through that entire period was known as David Palmer; to pretend otherwise is 1. outright advocacy for a particular point of view on the matter (the only places I've ever heard Palmer referred to as a she while with Jethro Tull are LGBT publications and Wikipedia) and 2. misinforms our readers, because no one would have referred to Palmer as a she during that period. At Laura Jane Grace people have at least managed to hack out a decent solution for the time being; however, the same problem described above exists with the Renée Richards article and is spectacularly bad at Theresa Sparks; the proposed wording would be able to resolve that. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:57, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Agree with Blade. It's an encyclopedia not an exercise in making people feel good about themselves. Otherwise any person with a biography on here could complain that they're not happy about the section concerning their adultery, massive fraud, or the murder of half a dozen people and we should remove it because it offends them and they say that they don't feel they ever really killed all those people, it was the voices in their head. The encylcopedia should reflect the history as it is, Lana Wachowski can have felt like a woman since she was born but she identified herself as male, went by male monikers, filed credits for films as Larry Wachowski or The Wachowski Brothers, filled out forms as a male, that is the reality of the situation. I raed the above link to Laura Jane Grace and an IP on there actually advocated removing all mention whatsoever of the name Tom Gabel and retroactively modifying the history of the person as if there was never a man named Tom Gabel in existence. It's ridiculous over sensitivity and not what the place is about, otherwise that album cover with the underage girl on it would have been removed quite sharpish. Darkwarriorblake (talk) 22:10, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Darkwarriorblake, if the problem is that some people want to remove all mention of the name -- not merely every instance in which the name is used to refer to Laura -- then why not deal with that problem? Why not explain to the user what "refers to" means and that nothing in the MOS forbids wording such as, "Laura Jane Grace, whom people used to call . . . ." In The Wachowskis the problem is almost the opposite; I have been trying to remove every instance in which Lana's old name is used to refer to her while retaining mere mentions of her old name, but another editor insists on referring to her by her old name. To prevent future violations of this sort should we revise the MOS to say that all mentions of trans people's former names is forbidden? (And, just to be clear, I am definitely not proposing this.) I do not see how that would be more overkill than what you are suggesting. -- Marie Paradox (talk) 13:55, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Blade, when have I ever advocated "rewrit"ing "history"? There is no reason we cannot acknowledge people's previous names while still referring to them in accordance with their new names, e.g., "John, whose name used to be Jane, lived with his parents in Wyoming until 1983." (This is exactly the sort of solution I have time and time again said I would support regarding The Wachowskis.) While editors may not refer to Eminem as Eminem while writing about his past, we do frequently refer to Mark Twain as Twain, even while talking about his childhood. We cannot avoid "outright advocacy" by writing articles as though a trans person is, say, Jane one day and John the next; that is a not very subtle suggestion that the correct view of trans people is a particular view that real people have advocated. This is an encyclopedia -- not an anti-LGBT publication. -- Marie Paradox (talk) 13:55, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

(Note; only a response to the section addressed to me) The names aren't an issue; it has been worked out that we use the proper nouns publicly in use at the time period being written about (in addition to Laura, The Wachowskis and Angela Morley are written this way), and MOS:IDENTITY contains nothing suggesting otherwise. A better non-transgender comparison is Muhammad Ali, as unlike Eminem or Twain he actually did change his name. We avoid advocacy by doing exactly the same with gendered pronouns. To use the Renée Richards example, the early life section is actively misleading; contrary to what the pronouns in the article state, Raskind was not attending a girl's school and captaining the girl's tennis team (Horace Mann at that time separated boys and girls, but then as now was one school, parenthetical added 16:46, 28 October 2012 (UTC)). It's not anti-LGBT to do what I'm suggesting, it's accurately documenting peoples' lives. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 15:27, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

The Renée Richards example is a false analogy. If she was in a class intended for boys, it was inaccurate to say she was in a class intended for girls. However, there is nothing inaccurate about using names or pronouns based on one's current situation. That is why we can say that someone named Isabella was born on such and such a day, even if Isabella did not have a name until some time after she was born. Indeed this is the pervasive practice in such situations. If there is disagreement over whether, say, a trans woman really was a woman, the only neutral, natural way to handle it is to call her by the currently used pronoun; it is only when we start calling her by anything else that we take a side in the matter.

Incidentally, the proposal, though being offered as neutral, is advocating more than I have suggested above. The proposal does not take all reliable sources into consideration; it simply privileges some sources (i.e. mainstream media sources that were written at the time) over others (e.g. mainsteam media sources that were written after the fact, the style guides of the same mainstream media sources, revised birth certificates, and genetic or neurological research that shows that trans people have had their genders from birth). If the proposal were to go into effect, we could not even take retractions written after the time of notability. Do I need to explain why painting ourselves into a corner like this is a bad idea?

-- Marie Paradox (talk) 16:04, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

There are two problems with this. One, how do we deal with the fact that Richards has records under the name Richard Raskind as a male tennis player? The current approach makes the entire Early life section seem to contradict itself. Secondly, I'll once again point to the Dee Palmer article as evidence why the current one-size-fits-all approach breaks down. As I've pointed out above, the article right now makes no sense (anecdotally confirmed by both people I've asked IRL to attempt to read it and by someone at Talk:The Wachowskis, which I'm sure you've seen) because we're going back 40 years to retroactively change someone's sex; Palmer was known as David through the entire time he was playing in Jethro Tull. The goal here is to remove these instances where articles are being left unreadable because of this. I've asked in a couple venues for some fresh input, so hopefully we can get a few people; I'm not sure whether or not this is RfC-worthy, but we can certainly do that if people think it's warranted. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:23, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

I am not advocating an all-or-nothing approach, though that is exactly what the proposal above is. If Kim's old name was Tim and Tim is a notable name for whatever reason, then we can include sentences along the lines of, "Kim, whose name used to be Tim, left her small town at the age of 23." This gives the reader all the information they need about Kim's name without referring to Kim as Tim. Looking at the "Early Life" section of the Renée Richards article as it currently stands[31], I do not see what the problem is. I must confess that I have not collected anecdata myself, but I suspect that if I asked the people in the circles I run in whether the section makes sense, at least 90% would say yes. If anyone does not understand why Richards would say she was raised a "boy", the mention of her old name provides a clue. And if readers have trouble understanding an article that is naturally, accurately, and sensitively worded, shouldn't our approach be to give them the information they need to understand it instead of protecting them from the aspects of reality that challenge people's worldview? -- Marie Paradox (talk) 05:47, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

There is no entirely neutral way of dealing with the issue of gendered pronouns for transgender individuals. If we refer to a male-to-female individual as "he," then we are taking a position. If we refer to a male-to-female individual as "she," then we are taking a position. If we switch back and forth, we're taking a position (and we look stupid). Because these three options are roughly equal with respect to politics, we should choose the person's most recent preferred pronoun because, unlike the other two options, it is polite.

What that does not involve, however, is revisionist history. Referring to Lara Wachowski as "she" does not make the assertion that she was born with female genitalia, only that she is properly referred to by a female pronoun. The way to prevent the readers from misunderstanding is to clearly refer to Lara Wachowski as a transgendered person by saying "Lara Wachowski, then Larry Wachowski," or "Lara Wachowski, who would undergo gender transition at the age of [XX]..." Any biographical article that that does not acknowledge a person's gender transition clearly needs to be rewritten in the first place. Whatever the politics of the matter, it's an important and relevant part of a person's life, at least as important as what school he or she attended or whom he or she married.

In this way, referring to a male-to-female individual as "she" while saying that she went to a single-gender school is not misleading so long as the article either 1. states that this is a male-to-female transgender individual or 2. refers to the school as an all-boys school. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:10, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Request for comment

Should the above proposed change MOS:IDENTITY Point 2 be instituted, or should the current wording be retained? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:24, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I think my view is pretty much evident from the above, and hopefully we can get some more input from an RfC. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:24, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

The current wording should be retained for the following reasons:

1. It is common, if not usual, to refer to a person at any point in the past using the referential words that currently refer to them. People, including Wikipedia's editors, refer to El Greco as El Greco, even when writing about the artist's childhood.[32] Similarly, though there is a time when it is acceptable to say, "It's a girl!", we would not say, "It was born in 1983," when talking about someone who is currently an adult. People often flout the common practice when they are being sensationalistic (e.g. "He's a she!") or when they are exercising poetic license (e.g. "Cassius Clay was born in Louisville . . . Muhammad Ali was born in Miami"[33]). Whatever the merits of these styles of writing elsewhere, it does not fit an encyclopedic tone.
2. Referring to someone using the words that currently refer never suggests anything about what terms were appropriate in the past (see Point 1). On the other hand, using different pronouns does indicate that they were the right pronouns in the past, even though some people view trans people as always having been the genders they currently identify with, and we might not know how trans people identified in the past. This raises questions regarding neutrality and sensitivity.
3. The proposed change is incoherent. If it were adopted, how would editors handle sentences like "Lana Wachowski has been a director since 1995"? This concerns a period that begins at a time when the media referred to Lana as "he" and ends at a time when they referred to her as "she". According to the proposed edit, we must therefore refer to Lana as both "he" and "she".
4. The adoption of the proposed change would allow or even require editors to refer to trans people using phrases like "he-turned-she" (as the New York Post once did[34]). This is unwieldy and insensitive.
5. As I argued above[35], the proposed change would put unreasonable limits on what would be considered reliable sources.
6. The proposed edit would require us to disregard the recommendations of trans advocacy groups.

As far as I can see, the only widely agreed upon rationale for making the proposed change seems to be that it would eliminate confusion. There are already people who have been making edits along the lines of what the proposed change would require, and I personally find the fruits of their good faith edits to be more confusing than the text they are trying to fix. In any case, there are better ways to reduce confusion. If the problem is that some readers are not acquainted with trans people's new pronouns, the current MOS allows us to use a wide range of methods to indicate how the person was once identified (e.g. "John, formerly known as Jane, was born in 1983"). If the problem is that readers do not understand trans people, the current MOS does not forbid us from linking to pages (trans woman, trans man, etc.) that will help them understand.

At this point the only relevant change I would like to see made to the MOS would be to make it explicit that trans people should be referred to using not only the pronouns but also the names by which they are currently identified.

-- Marie Paradox (talk) 19:19, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I believe that the wording should be retained and that we should use the most recent pronoun. 1. Confusion can be removed with careful rewording, as Marie Paradox says. 2. We can't avoid making political statements about trans people no matter what we do, and using the most recent pronoun is the most polite of our options. When accuracy is a matter of debate, courtesy can serve as a tiebreaker. 3. Personally, I see the use of a more recent pronoun as a correction of inaccurate previous reports. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:43, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Your #3 statement reflects advocacy and historical revisionism. How could previous reports be inaccurate when they were correctly reporting the identity professed by the subjects at the time? Those reports didn't get anything wrong.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 14:11, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

• Support proposal which would bring WP more in line with sources and prevent historical revisionism.
   — Berean Hunter (talk) 14:11, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
• Support the proposal in spirit but I might tweak the wording a bit This is a thorny issue. My major concern here is that the current wording creates a loophole that seems to preference personal statements above reliable sources. I think that loophole needs to be closed. When, say, The New York Times, refers to a person before their transition as a male and after their transition as a female, but we decide to use female pronouns for all stages of their life, as the MOS current advises, we are taking an advocacy position that contravenes reliable secondary sources. From a stylistic vantage point, using one pronoun throughout an article is confusing and switching pronouns in the middle of an article is confusing. Using one pronoun is confusing in that it seems to imply that the person was never a man (which may be some peoples' opinion but certainly confuses me when I read about "she" doing things that are male). Additionally, if the date when the person transitioned is not explicitly mentioned than it is unclear when she transitioned. Switching pronouns in the middle of the article is confusing in that the reader may find it difficult to follow who we're talking about. Switching pronouns seems a bit clearer to me stylistically. The current proposal could be tweaked to be a bit clearer - particularly the part "...that reflect that person's gender at the time of notability..."
  • Here is a draft rewrite: "When writing about a person whose gender might be questioned, editors should be guided by the usage of gendered nouns, pronouns, and possessive adjectives preferred by mainstream reliable sources. When summarizing this person's life, for instance in the lede section of an article, editors should use the terms preferred by recent sources. When writing about events in a person's past, editors should use the terms by which that person was referred to at that time but should always follow the conventions used with prevalence in mainstream sources." GabrielF (talk) 04:17, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose the proposal; retain current version – for the reasons outlined by Marie above. Being more compatible with older sources, as Berean Hunter suggests, is of no particular value; changing the reference terminology is not saying that the older sources are inaccurate, just that there's a modern modern way to convey the information.. It is better to respect the present, and to respect the subject of the BLP. Dicklyon (talk) 04:20, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

  This implies, for instance, that the sources referring to Richard Raskind playing in the 1974 men's 35 and over tennis tournament were somehow wrong. At that time, Raskind lived as a male and played in a men's tennis tournament; how is referring to a "she" during this period not revisionist history? It has nothing to do with respect (I certainly think very highly of Renée Richards and what she did), it's a matter of accuracy; pretending that Richard Raskind was a "she" playing in male tennis tournaments and fathering a child is actively misleading. To provide an NYT example, this is a great article on Renée Richards. And it's also worth noting that I think GabrielF may be onto some better wording; I'll look it over in the morning. And incidentally, this doesn't just affect BLPs; Angela Morley has been dead for a few years now, but the article still looked atrocious until I hacked out a semi-decent solution (it works for that article, but it wouldn't be feasible for articles like Dee Palmer). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 06:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Support. - Seems no different than referring to Ali as Cassius Clay pre-conversion. Makes sense to me. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 07:18, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose - Roughly speaking, per Dicklyon, I would prefer to err on the side of stylistic respect for all our article subjects, and see this as more a matter of style (e.g,. Manual of Style) and respect than a matter of conveying some external "truth". Two additional comments. First, I've seen MOS:IDENTITY used (see recent edits, for example, at Wendy Carlos) to suggest that complete exclusion of prior names is appropriate. E.g., [36]. (Added note: this turns out to be a bad example since "Walter" is used elsewhere in the article, but perhaps you take my point.) That seems a step too far to me, there's encyclopedic damage to not including the oft-sourced name "Walter Carlos" in that article--while I would argue for not using in general discussion, I do feel that it deserves mention and connection in the article, much as would any alternate name. Second, there's a question about Template:MOS-TW--as the creator of those templates, it was my intent to *communicate* consensus, not dictate it. Whatever we decide here should be reflected into Template:MOS-TW and Template:MOS-TM, of course. --j⚛e decker^talk 19:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

  On rereading the supports, I think I can perhaps draw my own line in this more clearly, I find the use of the phrase "historical revisionism" is telling. To the extent that an article, clearly, provides reliably sourced information that someone transitioned and changed their name, when, and so forth, how we treat pronouns and proper names beyond that point is, in my view, not a "revision" at all. It is a stylistic choice, not one of the essential meaning we are attempting to convey. And one properly guided by issues of style, respect for living persons, and so on. However, to the extent that we would entirely *omit* properly sourced prior names or transitions, that would (in my view) be a form of historical revisionism, and of course deeply problematic. Perhaps this better captures what I suspect is the fundamental difference in view between myself and the proposer. --j⚛e decker^talk 20:08, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose/Retain current per reasons by Marie above, especially #2. It also adds undo weight to the change of presentation by constantly and confusing switching pronouns used for someone. Especially for articles that are not organized chronically. PaleAqua (talk) 04:06, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  That seems to be advocating OR; since some people might not have ever considered themselves their cisgender, it falls on us to right great wrongs and "correct" past and present sources (c.f. the NYT link above). There's a reason that link doesn't take you to a section on preferred editing practices. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:54, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

  I don't see what original research has to do with it. By having a style guideline with a nice clear guideline about what pronoun to use we side step a lot of issues. We should use what sources reflect their current presentation is instead of trying to arbitrarily flip back and forth between pronouns based on what the pronouns the particular source uses. I don't see about why we even have to answer the question of if and when the subject of the article decided/realized knew that they were cis/trans/bi-gendered. Going down that avenue with our style guides seems like it would lead more to original research and less article stability. What happens if you have an older source that talks about a more recent time using the birth gender and an newer source talking about an earlier time using the presented gender? Normally in the case of transsexual and transgender individuals you will get a lot of articles that take not only about their transition but their very early life. Whereas the notability under the birth gender might only have articles about stuff that happen around the time that they became notable. Changing the wording just seems like it would invite edit warning and selective source bias. PaleAqua (talk) 22:21, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose Per PaleAqua above. The proposed change is confusing and non-encyclopedic. --Sue Rangell ✍ ✉ 01:54, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Allowable minimal change per MoS quote

• Per MOS:QUOTE: "Trivial spelling or typographical errors should be silently corrected ... a few purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment. This practice of conforming typographical styling to a publication's own 'house style' is universal."

• According to the CMOS (16th edition), this type of change is acceptable. The point of "minimal change" is to retain the wording, not the syntax or typography. According to the CMOS: "Although in a direct quotation the wording should be reproduced exactly ... changes are generally permissable to make a passage fit into the syntax and typography of the surrounding text." (p.621), "the initial letter can be changed to a capital or a lowercase letter" (p.622), "words in full capitals can be set in lowercase, if that is the preferred style for the surrounding text" (p.622). From page 624 of the CMOS: "Changing capitalisation to suit syntax: Aside from proper nouns and some of the words derived from them, words in English publications are normally lowercased unless they begin a sentence. To suit this requirement, the first word in a quoted passage must often be adjusted to conform to the surrounding text." "Initial capital or lowercase: "When a quotation introduced midsentence forms a syntatical part of the sentence, it begins with a lowercase even if the original begins with a capital."

• From the New York Times Style guide: "The Times does adjust spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and abbreviations within a quotation for consistent style." (p.281)

• From New Hart's Rules (Oxford): 9.1 General Principles: "While the wording of the quoted text should be faithfully reproduced, the extent to which the precise form of the original source is replicated will vary with context and editorial preference." (p.152) Further, 9.3.4 Typography states: "A quotation is not a facsimile, and in most contexts it is not necessary to reproduce the exact typography of the original." (p.160)

• Question. - Is it an acceptable typographical/stylistic change to alter capitalisation of "The Beatles" in a direct quote so as to conform to our "house style", i.e "the Beatles"? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 00:10, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I would say yes, but this is something we never got into in detail. BTW, when CMOS says "syntax", they don't mean syntax. — kwami (talk) 00:50, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I think you have misrepresented CMOS regarding "the Beatles" vs "The Beatles" in a quoted bit of running prose. CMOS allows for the following:

• George Harrison said, "the Beatles will go on and on."

In this example, the entirety of Harrison's complete sentence, "The Beatles will go on and on," has been changed only by knocking the initial capital 'T' down to lower case. Because the "The" was at the beginning of the sentence, CMOS assumes that Harrison would have made it lower case in running prose. The CMOS stands opposed to your position regarding the case in which a writer purposely puts a capital 'T' in running prose; the guideline says to keep true to the original typographical style as much as possible. This much, I think, is possible for us to follow. Binksternet (talk) 00:52, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think the CMOS cares one iota about what Harrison wanted, this has to do with maintaining a consistent "house style". I'm also not seeing where the CMOS prescribes the exact reproduction of quoted material. Can you point me to where it says this? Publishers adapt prose to their house style, so why wouldn't we? At any rate, our MoS says: "a few purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment", why do you think this does not apply? What have I misrepresented IYO? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 01:04, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

• Binksternet, would you agree that the current Wikipedia "house style" is "the Beatles"? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 01:06, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Music#Names (definite article). — kwami (talk) 02:05, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

GabeMc, my 15th edition CMOS says: "Syntactic and typographical considerations. Although in a direct quotation the wording, spelling, capitalization, and internal punctuation of the original should be reproduced exactly, the following changes are generally permissible to make the passage fit into the syntax and typography of the surrounding text." This is why I think CMOS endorses the odd/awkward capital in a direct quote embedded in running prose. Yes, the Wikipedia house style is now "the Beatles" in running prose. Binksternet (talk) 03:25, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Binksternet, the same section in my 16th edition states: "13.7 Permissable changes to punctuation, capitalisation, and spelling. Although in a direct quotation the wording should be reproduced exactly, the following changes are generally permissible to make the passage fit into the syntax and typography of the surrounding text." (p.621) So, it would seem the CMOS editors have made a significant substantive alteration to the text of the 15th edition. Do you now agree that the latest version of the CMOS supports my assertion that "t"s should be brought in-line with our house style, "the Beatles", and not reproduced as a facsimile. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 03:42, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I acknowledge that CMOS has had a change of heart on the matter, from the 15th to the 16th edition. The fact that there have been two different practices recently advocated by CMOS weakens the argument. Binksternet (talk) 05:27, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Does it weaken the argument more than this strengthens it? Also, the 15th edition of the CMOS is 7 years old, while the 16th is 3. Shouldn't we be using the most recently updated version as our guide, and not an outdated one?

• From the New York Times Style Guide: "The Times does adjust spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and abbreviations within a quotation for consistent style." (p.281)
• From New Hart's Rules (Oxford): 9.1 General Principles: "While the wording of the quoted text should be faithfully reproduced, the extent to which the precise form of the original source is replicated will vary with context and editorial preference." (p.152) Further, 9.3.4 Typography states: "A quotation is not a facsimile, and in most contexts it is not necessary to reproduce the exact typography of the original." (p.160) ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:31, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

The flightier sources (fansites, etc.) use a capital T in "The Beatles," but the more professional sites say "the Beatles." The impression that I get is that the fansites are trying to aggrandize the band and playing fast and loose with English (which is pretty loose, I'll grant) to do so. I'd go with yes, it is acceptable to correct the capitalization and use a lowercase t. However, Beatles fans have made such a ruckus about it that you should wear asbestos clothing while doing so. (To translate said joke into action, yes, use a lowercase T when inserting text, but expect to be reverted by a fan. Don't change it back unless you're prepared for a long fuss on the talk page.) Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:50, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

GabeMc has been systematically misquoting, ripping out of context and cherry-picking the material he quotes from the Chicago Manual of Style and Hart's Rules.

1. GabeMc purports to quote the following: "Although in a direct quotation the wording should be reproduced exactly ... changes are generally permissable to make a passage fit into the syntax and typography of the surrounding text. The ellipsis in the middle is highly distorting. What the CMOS actually says at that point is (emphasis mine): Although in a direct quotation the wording should be reproduced exactly, the following changes are generally permissible to make a passage fit into the syntax and typography of the surrounding text. GabeMc has conveniently glossed over the fact that the CMOS is here presenting an exhaustive list of well-defined exceptions, rather than delivering a general blanket endorsement of whatever minor changes an editor might decide upon, as his quote makes it appear. Needless to say, none of the limited classes of exception actually listed after this sentence apply to the "the/The" Beatles case.
2. GabeMc purports to quote: the initial letter can be changed to a capital or a lowercase letter. He omits the fact that the actual passage in the CMOS further points to some following sections ((see 13.13–16)), and those sections make it abundantly clear that they refer exclusively to cases such as the following: (13.14): When a quotation introduced midsentence forms a syntactical part of the sentence, it begins with a lowercase letter even if the original begins with a capital (the CMOS goes on to provide examples such as Benjamin Franklin admonishes us to “plough deep while sluggards sleep.” This is exclusively about the use of capitalization to mark beginnings of sentences.
3. GabeMc quotes, purportedly from p. 622 of the print version of the 16th edition of CMOS (the same page as the one of quote #1): words in full capitals can be set in lowercase, if that is the preferred style for the surrounding text. I have no access to the print version but only to the online version, same 16th edition, and I cannot find that quotation in that context at all. What I do find is something else entirely (emphasis mine): Words in full capitals in the original may be set in small caps, if that is the preferred style for the surrounding text. This, too, points to another section for more details, which makes it clear that it refers exclusively to matters such as "nasa" rather than "NASA". Gabe, did you accidentally misquote, or does the print edition have different text than the online edition?

   In any case, nothing in the CMOS has any bearing on the non-trivial issue of the use of capitalization to mark proper nouns. This is not a matter of trivial typographical style but a matter of orthography, and as such far beyond anything the CMOS section contemplates.

4. GabeMc purports to quote from Hart's Rules (Oxford UP), p.152 the following: While the wording of the quoted text should be faithfully reproduced, the extent to which the precise form of the original source is replicated will vary with context and editorial preference. Again, he makes this sound as if it was a blanket endorsement of whatever orthographic changes an editor prefers. He conveniently leaves out the following on p.157: In quotations from printed sources the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation should normally follow the original. This, as in CMOS, is again followed by a limited, exhaustive set of well-defined exceptions (p.158). Among them are the same two allowances for changes to capitalization: the initial letter of a whole quotation changed to integrate it into the surrounding syntax, and changes to words printed in all-capitals.
5. GabeMc further purports to quote from p.160: A quotation is not a facsimile, and in most contexts it is not necessary to reproduce the exact typography of the original. He conveniently leaves out the context: this is the section about "typography", and the next sentence makes it unmistakeably clear that it deals only with issues such as "change of font, bold type, underscoring, ornaments, and the exact layout of the text". This clearly does not include issues of orthography such as capitalization, because those have been dealt with in a preceding separate chapter ("spelling, capitalization, and punctuation")

   Again, there is nothing even remotely hinting at the possibility of a non-trivial orthographic change like the one he proposes.

6. GabeMc also quotes from the New York Times style guide: The Times does adjust spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and abbreviations within a quotation for consistent style. I have no access to the full text of this guide here, but from what I gather, this statement is from the context of a discussion of journalistic quoting of spoken language. I see no indication that it has any bearing on how to deal with written sources.

GabeMc needs to stop misusing these quotations for his "the" crusade. If he continues trying to change quoted text in Beatles articles, or continues using these blatant mis-quotations of guidelines in support of doing so, I'm quite prepared to block him for disruption. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:12, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for looking up the various style guides to see the full context. It is wrong for anybody to misrepresent a style guide in order to push a personal preference that is not intended by the style guide. Binksternet (talk) 14:51, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

That is a very good rebuttal of GabeMc's misleading quotations. However, it is still acceptable to change a capital t to a lowercase t when the direct article is capitalized in error, as in "The Beatles." The question is whether or not an [sic] tag is required. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:44, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Oh please, let's not start this again all over now. Capitalized "The"s in sources about the Beatles are not "errors"; they are a conscious and systematic orthographic choice made by a substantial portion of the reliable, carefully edited literature (albeit not the majority usage, and not the usage recommended by most style guides). Come on people, we just had a months-long decision process debating all these things to death. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:12, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Brad does not decide for the entire Wikipedia project what is and what isn't an orthographical error. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 21:56, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

When those sources consciously and systematically capitalize the definite article mid-sentence, they are constantly and systematically wrong. There is no need to replicate poor English on Wikipedia just because writers on other publications think something looks cool. If I felt like spelling "gender" "gendre," I'd be free to do so in my own writings but we wouldn't replicate that here. Wikipedia is a general-English publication and should use general-English rules. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:38, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

When the The is part of a proper name, then it should absolutely be capitalized, and this is a totally standard general-English rule. The question is whether it is, or not, in the Beatles case, and this is a question of fact rather than law, as a lawyer would say. Almost everyone agrees to capitalize The Hague, for example, and while some would like to claim this is a one-off exception, that is absolutely not so (compare The Colony, which also takes a capital The).

A decent rule of thumb is to ask whether it still makes sense to separate the definite article from the rest of the name. John was a Beatle, George was a Beatle, etc, so the core proper-name part seems to be Beatle. So the Beatles is probably reasonable. Similarly for Scorpions, Eagles, etc.

On the other hand, there's no such thing as an individual Who or an individual The, and without the definite article, those names are not very recognizable as appertaining to the relative bands. So I would propend for The Who and The The. --Trovatore (talk) 23:47, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Commendably logical, but not reality. Publications that use 'The Who' use 'The Beatles', ditto 'the Who' and 'the Beatles'. Rothorpe (talk) 23:54, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

My main concern is that the MoS not attempt to settle questions of fact, such as whether a particular instance of a definite article is or is not part of a proper name. That should be left to case-by-case determination. --Trovatore (talk) 23:57, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

The Hague absolutely is a one-off exception to the standard rule that "the" not be capitalized mid-sentence. Fans do not get to decide whether their own preferences are standard English. As for Trovatore's question of fact issue, considering that the sources that use "The" are largely fan sources meant to aggrandize the band and the ones that use "the" are the ones that tend to be written using standard English and have no reason to aggrandize the band, it is safe to say that "the" is the correct usage for the band, that "the Beatles" is not a Hague-type exception. Darkfrog24 (talk) 07:52, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

No, The Hague is not a one-off exception; I gave another example, The Colony, that is quite indisputable. The question is whether the the is an integral part of the name, or whether it's a standard English definite article. Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other, but there is no special case for The Hague. --Trovatore (talk) 08:35, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Guys, let's not side-line this discussion. The general question of whether and why "the" Beatles should be capitalized, in normal text, has been settled. We had a huge mediation process about it, and the result is it should be lowercase. There's no use rehashing that debate here now. This thread here should remain purely on the topic of how to deal with quotations. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:54, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

The discussion came out wrong. Maybe not for the Beatles case, for the reason I mention, but definitely for The Who. Contrary to Darkfrog's claims, I am not particularly trying to "aggrandize" them; it's just that the The is an integral part of the name, and therefore, according to the absolutely standard rules of English, should be capitalized. --Trovatore (talk) 08:58, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

The mediation discussion was exclusively about the Beatles case. If the Who case is linguistically different, it's not affected by the decision in any way. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:41, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

It's only been settled in the sense that Beatles fans made a fuss until they got their way, kind of like WP:LQ and the capitalization of bird species. That's not the same as being right. I support correcting whim-based policies. "The" is not an integral part of the name in any way that necessitates that it be capitalized. The "ge" in "George" is an integral part of the name, but that doesn't mean it needs to be capitalized. The "b" in "Yellow-breasted" is an integral part of the name, but we don't capitalize it, even in title case.Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:03, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Huh? What on earth are you talking about? The Beatles RfC decided in favour of lowercase – exactly the proposal you (and I) supported. What are you still unhappy about? Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:48, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

This problem was corrected? That's great. But then we're back to the same issue: The question is whether or not a [sic] tag is required. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:43, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, I am pretty sure in "the Who", that "who" is being used as a noun, so while it may seem different than the Beatles, its really not linguistically. An article of speech lets the reader know that a proper noun is to follow, so "who" is a proper noun in this usage. Afterall, if it wasn't a proper noun, then why would we capitalise it? Please do correct me if I am wrong. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:55, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Will do. No, articles do not indicate that a proper noun is to follow, as in "the basket," "a cube," "the article." Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:21, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, you're correct. An article of speech indicates that a noun is to follow, but not necessarily a proper noun. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:40, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Please bear in mind that The Who is very different from the Beatles. When writing the Beatles, the sentence could either be about the band or about members of the band, who are known as "Beatles". Members of The Who are not known as "Who", but as members of The Who. The is a part of the name of the band, The Who. The is not a part of the descriptor "Beatles" used to refer to members of the band. The decision to use lower case the in text for the band the Beatles refers only and applies only to the Beatles, and can not be extrapolated to other entities named with The as a part of their name. Apteva (talk) 00:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

For examples of "Who" being used as a descriptor see: "Tributes pour in for Who guitarist" and "Pete Townshend leaves the stage at Who concert in Florida". Also see the Who's bio at Rolling Stone, or Allmusic, or at the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) specifically uses "the Who" as an example and states: "A the preceding a name, even when part of the official title, is lowercased in running text." (original emphasis) (2010, p.416) Are all these sources wrong? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 00:18, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

• Fut.Perf., on your above point number 1: "GabeMc has conveniently glossed over the fact that the CMOS is here presenting an exhaustive list of well-defined exceptions", one of those well-defined exceptions is "2. The initial letter may be changed to a capital or to a lowercase letter." Another is "5. Obvious typographic errors may be corrected silently." ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:28, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
• On your above point number 2: "This is exclusively about the use of capitalization to mark beginnings of sentences." What? It pertains to mid-sentence use of quoted material with caps. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:28, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
• On your above point number 3: You: " ... the non-trivial issue of the use of capitalization to mark proper nouns". 1) Why have you declared an unpronouncable orthographical alteration non-trivial? Under what authority? 2) Correction. - "the" is an article of speech, not a proper noun as you stated above.
• On your above point number 4: You seem to be confusing wording with orthography, two very differnet things. Per "and changes to words printed in all-capitals" It actually says: "Text that is printed in full caps may be rationalised to upper and lowercase (or caps and small caps)". Also, on page 159, 9.3 Styling of Quoted Text, 9.3.2 Interpolation and correction: "In some contexts editorial policy may allow the correction of trivial errors in the original, judging it more important to transmit the content of the quoted matter than to reproduce its exact form."
• On your above point number 5: I think an unneeded capital intended to glorify the band constitutes an "ornament".
• On your above point number 6: WP:AGF. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:28, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

• From a review of Ian MacDonald's book in tes (UK): "Ultimately, the book's main achievement is that it manages to direct the reader to the music itself rather than simply fascinate with the mythology it is surrounded by. After all, as Aaron Copland once remarked, 'If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of the Beatles.'" So, did "the largest network of teachers in the world" make an orthographic error when adapting the Copland quote from MacDonald's "house style" to their own? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 01:51, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
• and what about Octopussy and The Living Daylights? -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 08:12, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Uhm, yes, what about it? Please don't be cryptic. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:30, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
    • Um, I thought this was a discussion about when we capitalise the "the" in names, and I just wanted to know if we can all agree on which way to jump... -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 15:30, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
      • That's a rather uncommon example. No, this is not a discussion about any and all questions about when to capitalize articles in names. This thread is about whether or not to stick to the original's capitalization choices in quoted text. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Headers that begin with a numeral: capital letter for text?

Should we use an initial text capital in headers such as the following which start with numbers?

• 1964: Research continues
• 1964 – Research continues
• 11:00 a.m. – First report

Or should these be lower case?

• 1964: research continues
• 1964 – research continues
• 11:00 a.m. – first report

This is something of an extension of the question about whether to capitalize following a colon. I think that in the case of a header, the initial capitalization should be preferred even if it is not preferred in running prose. Binksternet (talk) 16:16, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the initial capitalization should be used. EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:38, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I think it's different if there's a colon or dash; for instance, "research" would be left uncapitalized in:

• 1964 research

just like in running prose. And perhaps the recommendation should be to avoid numeral+colon or numeral+dash beginnings for sections. -- JHunterJ (talk) 19:06, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Section headings (version of 07:18, 8 November 2012), "[t]he provisions in Article titles (above) generally apply to section headings as well (for example, headings are in sentence case, not title case)."

All pages with titles beginning with 2012 A, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 a, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 c, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 e, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 f, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 i, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 m, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 n, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 p, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 r, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 s, All pages with titles beginning with 2012 t

—Wavelength (talk) 19:49, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

• The Wikipedia MoS currently says: "The provisions in Article titles (above) generally apply to section headings as well (for example, headings are in sentence case, not title case)."

• According to New Hart's Rules, "The word following a colon is not capitalised in British English (unless it is a proper name of course)." (p.74)

• According to the CMOS, "6.61 Lowercase of capital letter after a colon. When a colon is used within a sentence ... the first word following the colon is lowercased."(16th edition, p.327) Also, 8.1 "Chicago's preference is for the 'down' style ... sparing use of capitals." (16th edition, p.387) ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:29, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

• According to the New York Times style guide, "Ordinarily lowercase the word after a colon." (p.73) ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 02:10, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I think that the MOS suggests avoiding unnecesary caps, and not capitalizing in headings things that would not be capitalized in text, with the exception of the first letter. I don't see a good case for that exception being pushed to after a number. Dicklyon (talk) 04:21, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree, an initial capital should be used following a colon preceded by a numeral. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 06:15, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I think you mean you disagree with me then. Dicklyon (talk) 04:09, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

I guess I was confused by your comment, I thought you were saying that Binksternet was correct and I was not. I've heard this both ways depending on who you ask, or who reverts you. So, was I correct or incorrect in lowercasing the first letter following a colon in header? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:09, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps a bullet point should be added to clarify this, as there is no obvious indication (TMK) in our MoS as it currently stands. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:08, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

What letter case is required or recommended for the first letter in the subheading at The Morgan Library & Museum#2006 Renovation (version of 17:50, 10 November 2012)?

—Wavelength (talk) 17:55, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

It shouldn't be capitalised, like 1964 research above. Usual running-prose lower case. Rothorpe (talk) 14:13, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Rothorpe, would you say the same for 1964: research? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 04:58, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Not as a bullet point, no, as it's no longer adjective followed by noun: the colon balances the two parts (1964: Research), so the second is a sentence fragment, or title in its own right. But I've often noticed people using caps after colons mid-sentence, which normally they shouldn't. Rothorpe (talk) 14:59, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

How about as a section header? Ala: 1964: research. How do you stand on this issue? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:45, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Section header is what I meant, indeed. Capital after colon, new sentence. Rothorpe (talk) 01:15, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Downcasing in headings was one of the most intelligent, far-sighted decisions WP ever made. I think it was long ago. Tony (talk) 13:28, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

• Yeah, but I still can't tell what the consensus here is for or against. Is it "1960-1970: the Beatles" or "1960-1970: The Beatles"? ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 04:48, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

  That is not even a question. The band's name is "The Beatles", so in that case it makes sense to use a capital letter. If the band was named "Jefferson Airplane", the answer per above would be "1960-1970: the Jefferson Airplane". I was taught in school to capitalize after a colon. New Hart's Rules, section 5.2, page 89, says "In British English, matter following a colon begins with a lower-case initial, unless it is a displayed quotation or extract, but in US style a capital letter may be used if it introduces a complete sentence." I always thought of New Hart's Rules as being a British publication, but page 122 has four colons, two of which are followed with lower case sentence fragments, two of which are followed with upper case sentence fragments. It would be pretty bizarre to say:

  the sun is up. The sky is blue. It's beautiful, and so are you.

  Not capitalizing the first sentence of a quote, just because it was after a colon. Section 4.5, page 74 of New Hart's Rules says "A colon is used after the title of a work to introduce the subtitle. It may be followed by a capital or a lower case letter (Oxford style uses a capital)." I should add, though, that if it was a sentence with a colon, such as "After the early years, 1960-1970: the Beatles did not perform very much anymore in public." But I can construct a lot better sentences than ones like that that artificially use a colon. Apteva (talk) 10:07, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

This thread has to do with headers, not quotations in running prose, e.g. 1964: Research continues or 1964: research continues. GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 01:36, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Formatting of captions

Regarding Formating of captions, a stand alone sentence in signage, such as a solitary stand alone sentence as a caption of an image, should not have a period on the end of it. This is a solid design principle that no amount of prescriptive grammar can do anything helpful to refute. Who has authority to clarify this point in above cited MOS section? If no reasonable explanation why I am not right is give, in due course I will do it myself. It is quite simply a shockingly rude design gaff to clutter a beautiful page with a misplaced period. I am sure there is hope that Wikipedia will rise above that. Please give this some thought and comment. Thank you! :-) -Rogerhc (talk) 23:52, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

If you change that long-standing guideline, change MOS:CAPTION, WP:CAP#Wording, and Wikipedia:Simplified Manual of Style#Periods and commas to be consistent with your change to Formating of captions. Art LaPella (talk) 03:33, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Say what? Complete sentences should not have periods at the end if they are captions? Can you point out any publications that follow such a style? Or guides that recommend such a style? If so, then we can start to look at whether it would be a good move for WP to go that way. Dicklyon (talk) 03:38, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Rogerhc has asked me to comment here. To give some brief context for everyone else, I directed them to this section of the MoS last night with a few edit summaries where I had undone their edits (example). I am unsure why Rogerhc feels so strongly that a sentence used as a caption should not end in a period. My personal view is that they should. Aesthetically, I see nothing distasteful about a period. I do not see why a sentence in a caption should be punctuated differently from a sentence in the main article body. If I read a complete sentence without any terminating punctuation, I feel something is missing.

Searching the archives, it seems that between January 2006 and October 2006, Rogerhc's way was the standard on Wikipedia. The current rule was introduced on 4 October 2006 with these diffs: [37] [38]. The discussion of this change is at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Captions/Archive 1#Using periods, which includes a quote from the Chicago Manual of Style on the subject. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:27, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I've added a link to that discussion to the Register, to save anyone else the search. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:06, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm not clear on the what the objection here is. It says that, if the caption is a sentence, it should end with a period. If it is not a sentence, it should not end with a period. This makes perfect sense to me. Practically, I think most captions are not sentences, and would therefore not contain the supposedly "ugly" period. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 22:40, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

It definitely appears that in its short lifetime, the idea of having no period at the end of a one-sentence caption found approximately zero support in discussion. My question remains unanswered: does any publication that we know of use or recommend such a style? Until we get a positive answer, it's not even worth talking about. Dicklyon (talk) 22:44, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I think the no-period rule for shortish partial sentences as captions is probably a bit inflexible. But if it's changed, I think it needs to allow either, for the purely practical reason that the retrofitting would be horrendous. Any better ideas? Tony (talk) 13:30, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I would recommend for shortish sentences that could be sentences or could be phrases, such as "Turnips are vegetables" that adding a period or not be completely optional. My own preference even for long sentences is to not end a caption with a period unless it would look strange. The question is, is it a title or a block of text? If it is a title, then no period is used. By the way I have noticed that captions often use title case, instead of sentence case. If it is a block of text, then normal punctuation is used. A caption can be either - a title or a paragraph of text. Apteva (talk) 10:45, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Category Sorts for "University of"/"College of"

In the Category Category:History of United States colleges and universities, the entries have the sort keys so that "History of University of Alabama" is sorted under 'A' removing the "University of". While I prefer this, it is not done in other categories such as Category:Lists of chapters of United States student societies by college. Is there something formal on this? I can't find anything in Help:Category.Naraht (talk) 14:44, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Hluhluwe-Umfolozi

Dash/hyphen enthusiasts: please comment here. Axl ¤ [Talk] 23:15, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Naval artillery

I found another category of article names that ignores us. Compare Category:Naval artillery, most subcategories, and related categories to what WP:HYPHEN says about hyphenating phrases like "9.2-inch guns". Other sources hyphenate. Art LaPella (talk) 03:32, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree. In books, the hyphen in is almost always used in that context. Dicklyon (talk) 00:51, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Ending the endash/hyphen warring

This has been a divisive issue for too long. Proposal:

• Within articles hyphens are a valid substitute for an endash if used consistently.
• For proper nouns hyphens or endashes defer to common usage. See WP:TITLE. As of 2024, there are no known proper nouns which use endashes. For example, Mexican-American War is spelled with a hyphen more commonly than with an endash or a space.

Adopting this will eliminate all of the endash/hyphen warring. Apteva (talk) 05:41, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Can you clarify what warring you are referring to? Dicklyon (talk) 05:46, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Ah, apparently the kind of edit war that you are trying to start here, while ignoring the discussion that you had been involved in here. Dicklyon (talk) 04:18, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

More specifically, I think you are referring only to the controversial compound (or union, etc.) proper names, right? You're not talking about any changes to the rules for numbers, dates, etc., right? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 13:29, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. Hyphens are ugly when used to replace en dashes. I'm not in favor of uglification. Binksternet (talk) 05:48, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The ugliest thing in Wikipedia right now is extending the length of a hyphen in a comet name so that it looks more like it is suspiciously an endash instead. One must be careful with the pen in making hyphens, and not make them so long. Hyphens are used in some places, is every hyphen, ugly to someone? Endashes are correctly used in some places, but it is not incorrect to substitute a hyphen for an endash. In an article that only does that, it is not correct for someone to change the whole article from using hyphens to endashes. What is correct, is if it uses mostly one or the other to change the one or two that are out of place. If there is only one hyphen on the page, for a date range, for example, it is not correct to change it to an endash, because substituting a hyphen for an endash is an acceptable style and our MOS says so - after this proposal is adopted. It is the content of the article that is important, not the style of the content. Proper nouns are referred to WP:TITLE because most of them are notable enough to have their own article, or are person's names (not personal names as our MOS called them - a personal name is calling the Moon Minney, or Mickey), where hyphens, like in comets and bird, are exclusively used. Apteva (talk) 18:56, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Comment: "Warring", of course, means megabytes of debate, much of which was supplied by the same editor who proposes to rescue us from that same "divisiveness" by doing things his way (to be fair, Dicklyon also debates en dashes.) We can be pretty sure that victory for the hyphens wouldn't end the warring; the en dash empire would strike back. Maybe it's just as well that en dash wars continue; otherwise, the same people might war over something that matters. Art LaPella (talk) 06:36, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Probably you're right that he's referring to these disruptive debates that he keeps starting. If there's any place were I've posted even half as much as he has, let me know and I'll throttle myself. Dicklyon (talk) 15:31, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose promotion of the consistent errors. Note that WP:TITLE is about article titles, not proper nouns, and the only thing it says about dashes is "Sometimes the most appropriate title contains diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other letters and characters not found on most English-language keyboards. This can make it difficult to navigate to the article directly. In such cases, provide redirects from versions of the title that use only standard keyboard characters. (Similarly, in cases where it is determined that the most appropriate title is one that omits diacritics, dashes and other letters not found on most English-language keyboards, provide redirects from versions of the title that contain them.)" It doesn't mention hyphens at all, except for the allusion in that statement. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:04, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose—We've been over this, I don't see anything new here that would change the outcome. Within articles hyphens are a valid substitute for an endash if used consistently.—sure, if that is your house style or if you're confined to ASCII or something then using hyphens as a substitute would be reasonable. We don't have these limitations. Anyone can go ahead and write with hyphens, of course—nobody should be giving anyone a hard time for using hyphens. Others with the desire and know-how can go through and use the correct mark. Before I figured out how to type them in with my keyboard I was grateful to others for fixing what I wrote, eg. for page ranges. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 06:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  It is inappropriate to pretend that wikipedia is a publishing house and has a "house style" when it comes to things like hyphens. It makes absolutely no difference to write 1-4 or 1–4, and it does not need to be fixed. Sure, it can be fixed, but it is better left alone if that is the only place on the page that a number range is used, and nothing else is being changed. Sure in a featured article things like that can be "prettied up", but even in a good article there are far more important things to fix than to change hyphens to endashes. And hyphens should never be changed to endashes within proper nouns - because that violates common usage. If someone wants to publish a section or all of wikipedia they are welcome to use whatever "house style" they wish, and change all the punctuation to whatever they wish, but wikipedia has an obligation to use whatever is the most correct, and the most common usage. And no it is not most correct to use an endash in Mexican-American War. Using endashes in proper names creates edit wars, using hyphens in proper names eliminates those edit wars. Doubt me? Look at the ten times that Mexican-American War has been moved. Apteva (talk) 07:45, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

  • Au contraire, mon ami. Wikipedia is a huge and widely consulted publisher with over 4 million articles. Our current house style is already quirkily schizophrenic in that no style governs all articles, and I certainly don't subscribe to the view that we should be tolerant to what goes on elsewhere beyond the considerations that went into building our current MOS. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 07:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

  So quit pretending that it is a house style, when it clearly is not one. The purpose of the MOS is to help us, not hurt us, and it has long overstepped its boundaries. Time to fix that. Apteva (talk) 08:10, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose, on both issue-based grounds (people who will not accept that en dashes are proper punctuation and demand replacing them with hyphens are simply grammatically wrong, and we've proven this again and again), and procedural ones (re-re-re-f'ing-re-proposing this is not going to magically force consensus to change, and is a blatant example of gaming the system by "asking the other parent", i.e. regurgitating the same proposal/demand again and again in different forums here in hopes of coincidentally finding a sympathetic audience, after it's already been rejected by consensus multiple times). Enough is enough. This is not even a dead horse any longer, it's just a jelly stain in the dirt you keep flogging. Cf. WP:NOT#SOAPBOX, WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND, WP:TE, WP:GREATWRONGS, etc. PS: Of course WP:MOS is our house style. That's its entire raison d'etre. The only thing "hurting us" when it comes to this topic is your endless, angry "my way or the highway" attitude, for so long it feels like an eternity. WP:JUSTDROPIT. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 12:10, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Alternate proposal

This has been churning for too long, agreed. Alternate proposal:

• Within articles, hyphens or endashes or both may be used consistently per MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:DASH.
• For proper nouns, hyphens or endashes or both may be used consistently per MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:DASH.

Ending the endash/hyphen warring will eliminate all of the endash/hyphen warring. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:04, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think this solves the problem; it supports the current guidelines, sort of, but the "within articles...consistently" might tend to confuse some editors about what the guidelines say. The "warring" that you and Apteva refer to is I think just his consistent pushing to change the rules, via repeated disruptive RMs and MRVs and proposals to change the MOS, none of which have found any significant support (certainly nothing that can come close to the support for the current dash dashlines, which found wide consensus in a big and non-disruptive process over a year ago). Dicklyon (talk) 15:29, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. This is not a serious proposal and does nothing. The problem of edit warring - people moving Mexican American War to an endash and back to a hyphen ten times, only goes away when people who edit the MOS agree not to impose absurd standards on the encyclopedia. In date ranges, numbers, we do not have rules, the world has rules. We have guidelines and policies. Our Manual of Style can either help us develop the encyclopedia or it can hurt us. When it introduces bad advice, it hurts us, and it is absurd advice to misspell the comet Hale-Bopp on the MOS, and even worse to argue against it being fixed. The hyphen is on every keyboard, not so the endash. If someone wants to read the MOS and learn how to enter an endash for the years 1914–1918, they are welcome to do so, but they are also not prohibited from substituting a hyphen, and writing 1914-1918. If that is the only place a hyphen is incorrectly used as an endash in that article, it is better to just leave it as a hyphen. If someone who is making another edit wants to fix it they can, but it is not a valid edit to simply perform the edit just to change that hyphen to an endash. Edits are costly. Using hyphens for endashes are not worth correcting. Using endashes for hyphens will trigger an edit war if the MOS is not corrected, because they will always be corrected. Apteva (talk) 18:56, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
• No thanks: who wants sub-professional standards at en.WP by going against standard typographical conventions? Tony (talk) 00:31, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  You're in favor of not using style guidelines, because that will be more professional? -- JHunterJ (talk) 01:27, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  More likely he replied at the end of Apteva's section, not realizing there was an intervening subsection. I get caught by that kind of problem a lot myself. Maybe he'll fix... Dicklyon (talk) 06:23, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Ah, thanks. If that turns out to be the case, and it does end up being indented, any editor is free to delete my comment of 01:27, 27 November 2012 as well as this one. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Or maybe he objects to "consistently", which might be read to mean that an article has all hyphens or all en dashes, which would be nonsense. That's why I said it might tend to confuse. Dicklyon (talk) 16:20, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Ok, that is what I thought the proposal was. I'm confused. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:06, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose—I don't think there's any need to adopt a hodgepodge style. We hashed it out, examined relevant style guides etc, the support for the current style was/is quite overwhelming. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 06:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  I may not have phrased it clearly enough then. My alternate proposal was supposed to offer support for the current style (or "do nothing", as Apteva put it). -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:59, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Yeah, pardon, I may not be understanding you here, sorry. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:06, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

  Indeed, it seems that everyone except Apteva is against changing the guidelines, so we can let it go at that. Dicklyon (talk) 17:20, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Keeping the current guidelines is a vote to a) use inaccurate entries and b) create edit wars. I am certain that no one is in favor of either. Therefore the only option is the above proposal (allow hyphens as a valid alternative and use hyphens in proper nouns). Apteva (talk) 07:27, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

While it may not be your intention, "b" reads as sort of a threat. Just because some users might edit war over something isn't a reason to force policy in one direction or another. Personally I think this is a stylistic issue and while I don't care which way has been chosen or will be chosen we should follow the house style what ever has been/is/will be decided it is. Having an enforced style guide is a tool against editwars. For example consider ENGVAR, instead of someone changing colour⇔color in a article and then having a huge back and worth about which is right, it can be reverted to the version called for by WP:ENGVAR and much of the discussion and edit warring avoided. If a style guideline was given a large consensus to use apostrophes for possessive ( Sally's car ), right single quotes for the rare plural cases ( dot the i’s ) and a superscript i for abbreviating is ( itⁱs true ). I might argue against it here, but wouldn't edit war about it in articles. PaleAqua (talk) 17:57, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Apteva, we had a lot of edit/move warring, then we hashed it out and came up with the current guidelines. This has done a remarkably good job dealing with edit warring, as far as I can tell. In other words, the status quo appears to me to be the way to stop edit wars. Are there edit wars going on now that you have noticed that would be solved by your proposal? ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 18:55, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

No one would have had any edit warring if the MOS made the correct choice of using hyphens in proper nouns. Mexican American War would have been moved once and only once - to using a hyphen. Yes there are still edit wars going on now, and there will be forever until the MOS is corrected. The status quo is to use hyphens, not endashes. Apteva (talk) 04:35, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Now that's definitely a threat of continued disruption, since you're the only one fighting en dashes in titles as recommended by the MOS. You are the only person who has complained about, or tried to move, Mexican–American War since the new dash guidelines were worked out. And the only one trying to remove en dashes from titles of articles on airports, bridges, etc., too. To end the edit warring, just cut it out. Done. Fini. And look up status quo. Dicklyon (talk) 04:43, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

No, it is not a threat, it is a statement of fact, and not by me but by the hundreds of millions of readers who expect wikipedia to be correct, and will inevitably attempt to correct errors, like spelling Mexican American War with a hyphen if they see it spelled with an endash. Here is what status quo means - "the existing state or condition". The existing state or condition is that every proper noun is spelled with a hyphen (of those that use a hyphen or endash). Some of them on wikipedia are misspelled with an endash, and need to be fixed. English can change. Come back in 50 years and find out what the most common spelling for Mexican American War is and act accordingly. Right now it is spelled with a hyphen by a 50:1 margin. The MOS needs to be fixed to say that hyphens are a valid substitute for an endash and that proper nouns defer to primary use as stipulated in WP:TITLE. Until it is fixed there will always be edit warring over hyphens and endashes. Apteva (talk) 07:55, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Not a threat? "Until it is fixed there will always be edit warring over hyphens and endashes" sounds very much like one unless it's accompanied with a personal undertaking from you not to pursue the issue or war over it. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 08:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Not a threat. Am I the only one who read the clarifying words "not by me"? Apteva is predicting that "hundreds of millions" will flock to his cause, which is absurd but not a threat, because that unimaginable event would be outside his control, and thus not "An expression of intent to injure or punish another" (Wiktionary:threat) and certainly not punishable. I'm more open to the complaint that Apteva is much too repetitive about en dashes. Art LaPella (talk) 07:02, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose for reasons I've already given above. This is a non-issue. MOS is not in a position to be held hostage by tendentious editors with pet peeves they refuse to drop, and re-re-re-introduce as if they magically are immune to the fact that the idea has already been repeatedly shot down. MOS's mission is providing a consistent set of rules for WP editing, period. By definition, doing so will necessarily mean WP arrives at rules that not everyone is entirely happy about, because it only has rules for things that are contentious (note that we do not have a rule that "p" is spelled "p" and not "7", because no one fights to spell "p" as "7"). MOS's purpose is not to declare what is "proper" or "right" or "correct", only set a standard for what is most useful for WP as the encyclopedia with the broadest readership in the entire history of the world (this fact automatically militates against exceptionalist geeky bullshit). All other style concerns are entirely secondary. Just get over it and move on. PS: To put it more plainly, the answer to "Ending the endash/hyphen warring", to quote the section title, is "stop engaging in 'sport argument' about it and go do something productive or stop wasting everyone's time". PPS: I do not mean to imply that JHunterJ's attempt at appeasement is tendentious; rather, Apteva's tendention on this and various other nitpicks is so mind-numbingly, endlessly browbeating, that it has become disruptive and is arm-twisting people into suggesting compromises that do not serve Wikipedia's interests, just to get Aptvea to shut up. Giving the Apteva what it wants is not the only solution to the problem that Apteva's tendentiousness presents. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 12:22, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

  The preceding personal attack is neither warranted nor appreciated. The MOS is wrong and needs to be fixed. Apteva (talk) 01:26, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

  Apteva, to me it looks like only you believe the MOS should be fixed, that it is wrong. Binksternet (talk) 05:43, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

  And see also WP:Call a spade a spade: "[B]eing civil should not be confused with being friendly or courteous, let alone charitable or credulous." Apteva, criticizing your blatantly disruptive pattern at WT:MOS and elsewhere is not a "personal attack", it's a reality check. I'm happy to discuss this in user talk, since you've started a discussion at User talk:SMcCandlish#MOS (I have replied there at more length). But the short version is, you need to read and meditate upon the very short page at WP:Nobody cares, which precisely describes what is going on, then also internalize WP:Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass and finish off with a mixture of WP:Get over it, WP:Don't be a fanatic (especially points 3 and 4), and WP:Just drop it, especially the section "Forum shopping". See also the first law of holes. You'll be much happier if you apply those principles. As Tony1 and some others can attest, my first foray into MOS was oppositional and demanding, and resulted in me being angry and everyone else here being angry with me. I later figured out that it was more important for MOS to exist and provide a reasoned but often necessarily arbitrary baseline of "standard operating procedure" for style and grammar here, than for me to get my way about what I preferred MOS to say about this nitpick or that. There are many things in MOS that aren't the way I would write them, but I don't keep dredging them up and browbeating everyone about them month after month. MOS is explicitly prescriptive, and has to be, and it is not tied to what any particular external "authority" on style and usage says, but determined by consensus here, or as close to consensus as we can get, based on WP's own particular needs and nature. It is also an undeniable fact that various people will be unhappy about every single rule in MOS; we would not need to make rules about things unless they were things people disagreed about and editwarred over. The fact that you disagree to the point of outrage over one such point is simply evidence that we do in fact need a rule about it, and that such a rule will be arbitrary. So it goes. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 09:22, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Another alt proposal: RFC/U

Given the above re-asserted threat of continuing disruption, I think we need an RFC/U requesting as a remedy a halt of Apteva initiating anything to do with en dashes. I'll work on a draft in user subpage User:Dicklyon/Apteva; others can add evidence of previous attempts to resolve the problem, etc., and if it looks sensible I'll submit it. Dicklyon (talk) 04:18, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

OK, User:Dicklyon/Apteva is close to ready, pending a certifier or two. Should I wait for that, or go ahead and file it? Dicklyon (talk) 05:46, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Use of "the" in section headers

I'm sure that I read somewhere that we should not normally start a section heading with "The" (e.g. ==Problem== is better than ==The problem== unless "The" is necessary as the title of something or a quote), but there is nothing about this in MOS:HEAD so I'm wondering if I imagined it. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks. --Jameboy (talk) 03:05, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

"Headings should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings, unless doing so is shorter or clearer. (Early life is preferable to His early life when his refers to the subject of the article; headings can be assumed to be about the subject unless otherwise indicated.)" would apply. Adding "the" is redundant. Apteva (talk) 03:43, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Article titles, point 3 (version of 22:12, 26 November 2012) says the following.

• Do not use A, An, or The as the first word (Economy of the Second Empire, not The economy of the Second Empire), unless by convention it is an inseparable part of a name (The Hague) or it is part of the title of a work (A Clockwork Orange, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien).

Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Section headings, paragraph 2, sentence 1 (version of 22:12, 26 November 2012) says the following.

• The provisions in Article titles (above) generally apply to section headings as well (for example, headings are in sentence case, not title case).

—Wavelength (talk) 04:02, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

I see. Many thanks. --Jameboy (talk) 04:08, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Commas should be treated as dashes, for PUNCTFOOT.

A bot has been moving footnotes to the other side of the comma, much to my chagrin. I realize it's just following orders, but it's orders don't seem right to me. A comma is often used to separate two pieces of info. Why should the source for the first fact be on the other fact's side instead of directly beside what it's sourcing? It seems like the same rationale used for allowing footnotes before the dash should apply to commas, which serve the same type of sentence-breaking purpose, but in a "softer" way. Agree? Disagree? Both? InedibleHulk (talk) 08:58, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Disagree. It just looks ugly to write Some assertion^[28]. instead of Some assertion.^[28] It's even worse when styles which include the page number are used, e.g. Some assertion^[28]:112. (Visually the ideal would be to have the superscript set vertically above the punctuation, but this isn't a style easily available in web pages.) Peter coxhead (talk) 10:30, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand how one is "uglier" than the other. I agree we should have the footnote after a period, since the source backs the entire sentence (or should, anyway). I'm just talking commas here, where the source is backing only the claim before the comma. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:06, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Ultimately this is surely about the basic aesthetics of the visual appearance, rather than about any deeper rationale or implication. As a result it's all pretty subjective, but I agree that having the superscripted footnote number appear before rather than after the comma is the uglier option. As for the dash comparison, a dash (whether en or em) of course represents a bigger break – both literally on the page and in terms of sense – hence there's more justification for keeping any footnote marker closer to the word and preceding the punctuation; and, by contrast with commas and full stops, in this case I think having it that way round simply looks better. N-HH talk/edits 11:04, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Not an aesthetic thing. I find footnotes as ugly on one side as the other. It's a question of relevance. The source is relevant to the claim preceding it, and so should be on that claim's side of the divide. If you wrote your above dashed sentence with commas instead, it would mean the same thing. So the same rule should apply. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:08, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, you asked for opinions (about a fairly minor point), and you've got two so far that make the point about aesthetics and visual appearance, both of which come down on the side of preferring to tuck the footnote just beyond the comma; and, as I said, I simply don't agree that this might suggest that the footnote does not apply to the word or phrase that precedes the comma. Yes, they're only opinions, but that's the point: it's exactly what you asked for, and there doesn't seem much point in arguing with opinions of this sort anyway. Otherwise it just looks like you didn't get the opinions you wanted. (And when it comes to en-dashes, as in my post above, they are rather obviously different from commas in that there is already a gap between the preceding word and the following punctuation mark. The point is that the footnotes markers, as used currently, do not interrupt the usual flow of text and gap in either case, whereas the change you suggest would create a gap between the footnoted word and the following comma, where there was not one previously. The application may technically be different in one way for commas and dashes, but the outcome is the same in principle, in terms of maintaining the structure and formatting you would see were there no footnotes at that point). N-HH talk/edits 11:33, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate the opinions. I just thought they were missing my point, so clarified and reworded. You've got a good point on the gap thing. InedibleHulk (talk) 17:10, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

You could make the same arguments against the placement of references on one side of a fullstop as well, yet you have not. Why do you find these two cases different? --Izno (talk) 15:47, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Not sure. Maybe the difference between those is purely aesthetic. InedibleHulk (talk) 17:10, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I think that placement in the case of commas and full stops is just a matter of aesthetics. For example, if the placement were semantic, in some cases the reference should be before the full stop and in others after. E.g. It is found in Borneo and Sumatra.^[12] would mean that [12] supported the whole sentence, but It is found in Borneo^[11] and Sumatra^[12]. would show that [12] only supported the second location. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:47, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

But that pretty much automatically means it is not a matter of aesthetics, since you just pointed out a semantic difference. The entire point of using logical quotation is that "in some cases the reference should be before the full stop and in others after", because of what the source actually said, vs. what lazy application of habitual journalistic punctuation can be (unintentionally or otherwise) used to make it seem like the source "might" have said or implied. This is the entire crux of the logical quotation "debate", which was really over several years ago. LQ is demonstrably, provably more precise, and that's really all that matters for us. This is not a WP:ENGVAR issue, because nothing at ENGVAR approaches core issues of verifiability and end-user reader interpretability. It's not like "tyre" vs. "tire" or "bonnet" vs."hood". In the most important cases, it's whether a quotation – a potentially very controversial one – is complete or (intentionally? manipulatively and misleadingly?) fragmentary. Just adhering to the discipline of using LQ when writing article text here is a very good exercise is checking oneself against small, subtle forms of WP:OR, by the way. It's mean to say it (and I'm an American), but most generally unintentional "run too far with the source" edits of that sort are by Americans, and it's because, due to 1700s typesetters' quotation being habitual in US publications, they have not learned this mental regimen of compartmentalizing *the sourced facts* from *their assumptions of what the sources "really" mean*. LQ borders on crucial to WP's credibility. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 13:07, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

There's a major difference between quotation and referencing which means that the placement of reference marks has little if any relationship to logical quotation. Defining the precise limits of the text which a reference supports is impossible with any of the standard reference systems.

• With the Harvard system, how many sentences after an opening like "Smith (1988) said ..." are supported by the reference? Or how many sentences before and after the occurrence of "(Smith 1988)"?
• With the superscript numbers system, how many sentences back does a number after a sentence (including its full stop) apply? If it's the last sentence in a paragraph, does it apply just to that sentence or to the whole paragraph?

Unless at least every sentence is required to have a reference, readers have to trust writers (or be prepared to check the source if they don't).

Quotations are different because their beginning and end is clearly marked (whether by quote marks or indentation). There's an sound argument that the punctuation inside these markers should, as far as it has semantic content, be that of the source, even though this produces sequences of punctuation marks which many find inelegant if not downright ugly.

I suppose it would be possible to have a referencing system which had similar beginning and end markers, but none of the standard ones do. So nothing of great substance is gained by attempting to distinguish between ... Sumatra.^[12] and ... Sumatra^[12]. whereas there is a small but useful information gain in distinguishing "... Sumatra." and "... Sumatra". Peter coxhead (talk) 15:59, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Visit From the or Visit from the?

What do you guys think about this? – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 13:21, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I believe the author is not able to dictate Wikipedia article titles. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:17, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Right. And it's "from" not "From". — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 11:55, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Funny but not funny BLP issue in the "Commas" section

Seriously, folks, hilarious as it is, we cannot use supposition of baby-producing infidelity between a pop star and a major world leader, both living people, as silly hypothetical examples to illustrate points about comma usage. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 11:55, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Singularity commas

A badly needed addition to the end of the serial commas section is something like the following, but made less geeky than I wrote it, if possible:

Commas can also indicate singularity, and this can be used inappropriately if sources do not support the singular. E.g., her daughter, Jane, was born in Albuquerque conveys that the subject has one, and only one, daughter and that her name is Jane. The construction Her daughter Jane was born in Albuquerque does not imply such singularity – the subject might have daughter or three. In the absence of a source that reliably confirms singularity, always default to using the form without the commas; even if plurality is not sourced, the comma-free form remains logically correct, regardless of the number of referents, and this is never wrong, only imprecise at worst. Imprecision can be resolved later with better sources.

It's 4:30 in the morning in my time zone, and I give up trying to get this MOS point across in friendlier language. It's an important thing to add in some form, though. Misuse of the singularity commas is one of the most frequent grammatical/typographical errors I correct in WP articles, day in and day out. It's certainly way more of a persistent problem than most of what pops up here as "issues". — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 12:39, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

WP:NCCAPS → "shorter than five letters" rule

With regards to this and this, and in general, isn't this whole "shorter than five letters" notion leading to inconsistent, illogical results? And where does it come from? (like, what's the reference work for [English-language and otherwise] title capitalization out there?)

I mean, as is, when in mid-title, it produces things like this:

"than", "from", "till", "Until" – ... from ... Until... looks weird, does it not?

To conform to this, From Dusk Till Dawn had [rightly] just been changed to From Dusk till Dawn – problem is, it seems to be spelled From Dusk Till Dawn virtually everywhere else (a similar case would be Stranger than Fiction vs. IMDb's Stranger Than Fiction);

also, it's still Wait Until Dark, although "until" is just a one-letter-longer variant form of "till".

But if "till" were changed to "Till", we'd still have the lowercase "from", making for constructions like ... from ... Until... and ... from ... Till....

Changing "Until" to lowercase in turn would then be at variance with a whole host of other five-letters-or-longer prepositions and conjunctions.

Seriously, what the heck? I'm confused out of my mind... – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 15:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)